Big update of our website
The actual version of our website that you have under your eyes has been first designed and coded by Raphaël Bastide back in April 2014. Since then, it has grew a lot, has been slightly updated many times and has seen the number of fonts displayed drastically increase. We love our website has Raphaël made it. Its black and white, its marquees, its blinking look and feel. This website is the cornerstone of our identity and our main link between our fonts and their users.
The increasing size of our catalogue, the increasing diversity of the fonts that join it and the increasing number of styles per families — when we where used to release mainly single-style family — asked for a slight re-thinking and redesign of how we show our fonts.
Here are the main changes
- Total redesign of the homepage with the hability to sort and filter our typefaces with many parameters such as the number of styles, release date… This was made thanks to David Desandro’s Isotope. We also created a new way to display font-families with numerous styles which put emphasis on a master style.
- Wider display. We got rid of our right column to give more room to every page. Some of the content moved to the still exisiting left column when some other moved to our brand new footer.
- Body copy font. Thrilled by this font we were about to publish, we decided to change our text font for our newly released Minipax by Raphaël Ronot. It’s now used for pretty all the small size and longer texts you’ll find on the website. We hope that you’ll like it as much as we do. It’s almost to comfortable to read, isn’t it?
- Web specimen. Goodbye our former never-changing template, now each font has it’s own web-specimen that shows its particular qualities way better. Those web-specimen will even show you the opentype features embedded in our fonts. Are we in 2013?? Also, goodbye our good ol’ test zone, because now every piece of specimen text can be modified by our visitors.
- Charset. Our charset now shows every character in the fonts, even the ones without any unicode code, thanks to the opentype.js tool.
- Version history. Certain of our fonts have an insteresting story to tell. They been updated, modipfied, upgraded, sometimes by their original author(s), sometimes by different people, over time, during years for some of them. We needed to tell this story. Our new version history section tells what has been made on each version and by whom and gives access to the files of each version! This allows some deep time traveling. We also coded some pretty neat automatic family tree.
- Better credits. We now provide more precise credits about the team who worked on each typeface.
- Fontlog! You can have an overall chronological view on each release or update that has been made to each of our fonts, since the beginning. Dive inside our history.
- About section. Our about page became a whole section with sub-pages such as a handy and growing F.A.Q. or a summary of our activities along the years (workshops, exhibitions, publications, awards…). We even had a ressources pages where we will list and add any tool that we used or find handy.
- Footer. Let’s introduce a plain and simple footer that allows some straitforward navigation threw the pages of our website.
Credits
This update has been mainly designed and coded by Jérémy Landes with some help of Anton Moglia and helpful thoughts and feedback from all the Velveteam. The content has been edited and updated by all the community. Thanks everybody! We hope that you’ll enjoy the new look!