Elsewhere

Art Space Tokyo A gorgeous guide to twelve intimate art spaces around Tokyo (designed by Craig Mod, most recently of Everymoment Now). I purchased my ticket to Ghibli this morning. 

The Future of Japanese Food No doubt exacerbated by the aforelinked Quarter Pounder and its kin of “gourmet” versions of familiar Western chains. 

Quarter Pounder McDonald’s serves up gaijin-size Quarter Pounders (and Double Quarter Pounders—and that’s it) sans branding. Intriguing. Of course, it’s still just a Quarter Pounder. 

wp-Hyphenate A clever Wordpress plugin that embeds soft-hyphens and zero-space entities in your text providing browsers with the cues necessary to successfully hyphenate words. hyph-n.com has a dingus to try it out if you don’t use Wordpress. 

Making Web Fonts Work Jon Tan on the current state of embedding typefaces. It never occurred to me that @font-face might incur a delay before rendering text (a common complaint against sIFR). And I had completely forgotten how rubbish ClearType is. Until anti-aliasing discrepancies between platforms can be resolved I don’t see even a standardized approach being accepted by discerning designers. Looks like we’re in for another four years of flash replacement. 

The State of Font Embedding Mark Wubben, the maintainer of sIFR, thinks out loud about font embedding and the various stop-gap alternatives. 

The Listenings Richard over at Diesel Sweeties is following up on the Thrillening (a synchronized, distributed listening of Michael Jackson’s Thriller in its entirety) with a listening of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars using Twitter as a backchannel for the event.  

Giving geometry a bad name The new Pepsi logo just doesn’t add up. There’s no point flaunting your geometry if the finished piece comes across arbitrary and unbalanced.