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Fontwalk

fontwalk.de

94 pointsjorkvist28 comments

On one hand I think this is an innovative presentation, and I enjoyed the creativity. Also I like fonts.

On the other hand, (and this is a critique of scrolling/parallax navigation in general), as a user I always feel like I'm doing this wrong. It feels like I'm a cameraman with one of those old-timey hand-cranked movie cameras from the Charlie Chaplin days where the skill was in keeping the shutter speed constant but I'm doing it wrong and everybody is walking around at a weird speed.

The ability to reverse the animation by scrolling up is novel, and maybe going at my own pace is the idea. But personally I would rather click next and let the transition happen normally. Maybe Powerpoint has made me lazy.

It is a fad, let's face it. That's not to say that it isn't pretty and it is great to experiment but we don't really colour the scroll bar pink anymore.

I think parallax can be an effective way of presenting information on a page (easier to scrub than video, more cohesive than a slide deck and more lively than a static page).

But here I think they overdid it. There is too much going on, I can't tell where I am, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to get out of it. (Probably doesn't help that I don't remember much German from high school, but even then I'm not sure the actual text content would be all that helpful).

There is a longer texts at the end of each of the three distinct sections, informing you about the specific font you just saw, as well as its included features.

You can skip between these sections be clicking on the little markers on the right.

All the other text is there to show you the fonts and their features in action, be it ligatures, be it international diacritics or different font weights.

I'm beginning to get sick of websites hijacking the scrollbar. Is there a way to disable it? When I tried to scroll down, it kept freezing/locking up and began to flash rapidly as Safari tried to scroll down and the JavaScript forced it to scroll up. While this makes for a cool demo, please don't use this in production, it can impair user experience.

that is the user experience.

What am I missing? I don't get it. I clicked all the links and all I saw was some shit flash around. What?

I assume you're making a point; if I'm correct, you're making my point.

try scrolling.

Hah, at this point, why not just make a video?

i remember seeing at least one other font trailer way back in the day, but this is the only one that i can remember a url for

http://www.trixiefont.com/

Overall, I didn't even get to pay much attention to the actual content, all I was focused on, after a while, were those animations & how to get them moving.

If the only aim of the designer was to display the power of parallax scrolling, Kudos.

One of the few things worse than a website full of pretentious garbage is a website so full of pretentious garbage that I can't even tell what it's promoting.

Do you read German? I've only taken a bit, and it's pretty clear that it's an advertisement for various fonts that they're selling.

I read zero German and it was obvious.

looks great, but now my index finger hurts

Interesting, I've always used my middle finger for the scroll wheel.

For scrolling small distances there's the mouse wheel; for everything else there's spacebar.

I have a button on my mouse to make the scroll thingy freewheel, it's pretty neat.

Don't forget the venerable arrow keys

I just put a rock on top of Page Down.

I wonder whether there's a market for "key weights" that fit a key exactly and are heavy enough to keep it pressed. Depending on the occasion I have used heavy implements (not exactly rocks), a variety of wedge-like tools like scissors and other things to keep a key pressed, but a dedicated tool such as a properly-shaped paperweight might have been much nicer ;)

In linux you could write a script with xdotool to select the window you want and spam whatever key/sequence of keys you would like.

this kind of interface is totally made for a touchpad or touch screen. on anything else, it's weird. or even weirder, anyway.

Click the middle mouse button. Move the mouse down slightly. The more you move it down, the faster it scrolls.

No need to hold any buttons.

I liked this, but the site is likely not expecting as high volume of traffic as it is receiving, if it doesn't load for you right away (like it did for me) just wait a few minutes and try again.

If someone is interested, they've used this: https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr

Consistently crashes MobileSafari on an iPad mini with latest iOS 7, just like the Google Translate webpage.

I'm really getting tired of these MobileSafari crashes.

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