A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

The Revolution Will Be Solarized
The name says it all: the Sunbelt of the United States ought to be ideal for solar power. Slowly the South is getting on board.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor

Ampersand 2013 — held today in Brighton, UK — was the third iteration of the popular web typography conference.

Describing itself as “an affordable one-day event for knowledgeable web designers and type enthusiasts”, the event is increasing in popularity year on year, and several people I spoke to today felt that this year’s was the best so far.

The sessions kicked off with the keynote, presented by Erik Spiekermann. Prof. Spiekermann is one of the preeminent identity designers working today. Responsible for both FF Meta and ITC Officina typefaces, he has launched several design businesses, but will be most familiar to many for his book “Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works”.

Erik Spiekermann offers advice for a happy and productive work-life.

Spiekermann gave an entertaining talk, in which he played to British stereotypes of Germans. He recounted trying to persuade a Portuguese employee of Mozilla to change the name of a typeface Spiekermann had designed for them from “Feura”. His concern he joked, was that whilst the name might work well on the Iberian peninsula, in English its pronunciation was a little too close to “Fuhrer”.

The keynote was sprinkled with great information, tips — Spiekermann likes to compare type using words that end with an ‘a’ — and plenty of opinions too — he likes Georgia for body text, loathes Arial, dislikes Helvetica for the screen and can’t understand why Apple aren’t using Lucida for iOS.

Gerry Leonidas discusses the incongruities of type in Sci-Fi films.

The following session was presented by Gerry Leonidas, senior lecturer in typography at the renowned course at the University of Reading. Leonidas focussed on the problems of truly complex typography, laying out Shakespeare for example, and on the need for a more contextual markup.

In addition to hierarchy, Leonidas would like to see a way of contextualizing each element on a page. His proposed solution was to add chainbefore and chainafter attributes to to HTML elements, allowing content authors to specify where in the context of the document an element fits. He believes this will enable far more complex layouts than are possible with nested <div>s and would be particularly useful in responsive design where rearranging pages as a result of browser shifts can break not just hierarchy but context.

Mark Boulton argues the case for traditional typographic qualities in responsive design.

Inevitably responsive design was a theme carried throughout the day and the most interesting presentation was made by Mark Boulton. The title of his segment was “Typography in Responsive Design”, but he actually argued, very persuasively, that “Responsive typography is just typography”.

In discussing his own methodology, Boulton talked about a realistic approach to responsive type which he likened to the British Olympic Cycling team’s famous mantra “Marginal Gains”, in which emphasis is placed on improving every small detail that you can, trusting that the cumulative effect will produce a significant result.

Ben Terrett (right) and Chris Heathcote impart some of the problems hosting your own webfonts after their experience with gov.uk

Kutlu Çanlıoğlu discusses the complexities of adding arabic type to the BBC World Service websites.

Nina Stössinger presents the finer points of type design.

Andy Hume argues for webfonts to be treated as a progressive enhancement so that they don’t risk blocking content.

The talk of the day went to Jenn Lukas of Happy Cog, who focussed on how designers and developers can work together to ensure typographic decisions aren’t lost in translation. Her energetic and enjoyable presentation did a great job of lifting the room after the final break of the day and umpteenth complimentary coffee.

Jenn Lukas argues the case for third-party hosted webfonts.

Christian Schwartz identifies the key characteristics of type used for newspapers.

There were dozens of great ideas, insights and hopes for the future, presented at Ampersand 2013, many of which we’ll be sharing on WDD in the coming weeks.

However those of you in North America have something more to look forward to: previously only ever held in Brighton, Ampersand NYC will take the typography conference to New York City on the 2nd November. The schedule for the day is yet to be announced, but the increasing reputation of the event on this side of the Atlantic means that the early bird tickets, currently available on ampersandconf.com won’t last long.

Were you at Ampersand 2013? What topics do you hope are covered at Ampersand NYC? Let us know in the comments.

eBook: How to Grow your Business on Twitter – only $9!

This is a guest post from Alexey Laduda about his experiences using Treehouse to build out his project, Urban Time Lapse.

It all started in the wonderful city of San Francisco, where creative ideas seem to float in the air as thick as the sea breeze. I’d just walked out of SF City College with a sound design certificate in my hand when I realized there simply was no work in my field available that could suit my creative thirst. I started searching for a new challenge.

Of course, because it’s San Francisco, there was plenty to be heard about the wonders of the internet.
The idea of turning an inspiration into a functioning, usable thing intrigued me. Everywhere I went, it seemed that folks around me were constantly excited about what projects they’ve got going on, about the apps they’re designing, and how they plan to change the world. I wanted in! Web design seemed like the best possible option for a career; high in demand, extremely creative, and always evolving, with new trends coming out nearly every day.

But starting out was not easy. After a few hyped up weeks of watching tutorials and reading a ton of ebooks, I realized what a broad set of skills I would actually need to start making my dreams into reality. Just before freaking out, having no idea where to turn, I spoke to some friends about my dilemma. I was advised to start from the very bottom and build my way up. That meant I had to get the dirty work done (html/scc/design) before moving on to any of the cooler, more exciting stuff like frameworks. My buddies help me put together a whole new list of forums, podcasts, and books, but most importantly, Teamtreehouse.com came in to the picture.

Frustrated by hearing about how to do things, but never having any guidance doing them, I dug deeper into the tools my new discovery had to offer. Turns out, I’d come across a true diamond in the rough! The site was intuitively organized, the videos were highly informative (but in simple, everyday English!), and I found myself able to follow along the courses with a little practice of my own at the same time! The teachers are amazing and courses built in a very unique way, with each lesson being a kind of adventure with a neat twist at the end. With each new thing I learned with Treehouse, I felt very inspired and motivated. What impressed me most about the folks at Treehouse was their willingness to respond to regular users like me. I mean, getting email from a founder to answer my questions was pretty amazing. It’s little things like these that make you feel like you are part of family where everyone cares and wants to help.

Treehouse Facebook group was another great source. The hundreds of people reaching out and helping to solve each other’s problems together as a community was amazing. Seeing people talking about their projects made me realize that it’s time to really get my feet wet with my own website.

UrbanTimelapse.com is made to fulfill one’s desire to discover the world, one city at a time. The idea came at the very moment when I finished watching a time­lapse video of my hometown. Seeing my city through the lens of time­lapse photography felt mind blowing. Hundreds of memories were brought up instantly. I discovered a beautiful tool to help me show where I am from and discover places I wanted to go. Digging deeper, I found an enormous community behind the videos. I thought, there’s a wonderful chance to bring curious and creators together in one place and I’d like to give it a shot.

UrbanTimelapse.com is built with Twitter Bootstrap on Backbone.js framework, with Parse.com as a database, and is hosted atHeroku.com It took me a great amount of time to build the prototype that you can see now, and not without help from my mentors. It is thanks to the folks over at Treehouse that I overcame the fear of getting started on this wild online adventure. Without them I don’t know how long it would take me to get going.

So far I’ve only gotten a positive feedback and I’d really like to continue developing the project. Seeing all the time­lapse videos scattered around the web and not being noticed only urges me to continue evolving. I want to implement search functionality by city or country, make user accounts where photographers can share their own videos and follow other photographers they like, add more information about cities, and more. I’ve got plenty of ideas for which I’d be more than happy to team up with a Treehouse student who’s interested in and would like on the development side or give some advice.

Cheers and thanks for reading! See you in cyberspace.

The post Student Success Stories: Alexey Laduda appeared first on Treehouse Blog.