Taylor Poulos

Taylor is a designer and writer, currently working at Moment in New York, New York. He started making software when he was twelve, eventually focusing in UX design and research.

At Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh PA, he majored in Information Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, and Creative Writing, and was heavily involved in the hackathon community. As a hacker and a hackathon organizer, he worked to make the hacker community more diverse by running a hackathon that was accessible to people from underrepresented backgrounds and running workshops that introduce technical skills to a broader group of students.

Since then, he’s been obsessing over type on the web and thinking about how crowdsourcing techniques can be applied to creative tasks.

For more, keep up with Taylor at twp.io or on Twitter as @twpoulos.

Presentations

UX Camp: Front-End Camp 2017

Ironing Pixels – How to Achieve Perfect Type on the Web

Designers are an obsessive group of people, especially where type is concerned. 18th Century type designer John Baskerville famously ironed each sheet of paper and brewed his own ink to achieve darker, more uniform letters. This attention to detail produced books that noticeably advanced the state of the art.

However, as design has become more digital and less tactile, designers have become removed from the process of setting type. Few understand how the bits on their hard drive get turned into letterforms on the screen. As Mig Reyes pointed out, modern interfaces are 90 percent typography, and it is more important than ever to set type effectively. By learning more about the process of how type gets rendered on a screen, we’ll be equipped to sweat the details and build beautiful, typographically pristine websites.

In this talk, we’ll get into the nitty gritty of how type is rendered. We’ll cover:

• What information goes into a font file, and how to tell if a font has been built to work effectively on a wide variety of screens
• Web font loading and rendering, and how this process is different than what you might be familiar with in Sketch or Illustrator
• Emerging standards—like variable fonts—that will change the way we set type on the web in the upcoming years