Vector and Beyond

Earlier this week, I had a post with number of entries related to pixels (more or less), so it only makes sense to look at one more related to vectors.

There have been some major developments (and debate) in regards to icon fonts, ranging from the practical (using them as, well, icons) to the insane (a map font of the USA? Really?)

Of course, one of the reasons this space is opening up is because of the availability of @font-face options right back to Internet Explorer 4(!). (See my earlier article for more on this). Still, while we’re seeing a number of web fonts become available, it’s still early days. Trent Walton notes some of the fonts he’s looking forward to seeing available on the web soon.

Not strictly vector so much as unicode, http://www.character-code.com/  is pretty useful for all of those times when you need a glyph but don’t know how to get it in HTML. (I’m sure I contribute to a number of the hits to the wikipedia unicode page for this exact reason).

On the side of vector insanity is  http://one-div.com/, where CSS3 trickery is used to make various icons using only one div (hence the name). For more general CSS3 insanity (and a good resource in general), check out http://xycss.com

One thing about vector imagery is that it’s flat. (Well, until you add all the gradients). However, an interface with flat vectors can still be skeuomorphic. And to sum it up best: food for thought.