Jim Regan -- Site Reviews
Counterspace
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Created by studiomotiv, an IT design company creating CD-ROM multimedia titles, interactive kiosks, and Web sites (all of which require decisions about typefaces), CounterSpace's design is decidedly minimalist compared to the average site. White space frequently occupies more of the page than text, and animations are low-key. (This spartan design effectively demonstrates that sites with comparatively little content can still benefit greatly from thoughtful design and execution.)
After the (comparatively dynamic) opening animation, CounterSpace's index page appears, along with the only - briefly - disconcerting aspect of the visit. Each section of the site is listed in a navigation bar at the top of the page, and summarized below. My 'instinctive' inclination was to read, and then click on one of the summary headers to proceed into the site, and when nothing happened, I momentarily wondered if the page hadn't completed loading, if I needed a more recent browser, etc. In fact, the headers simply aren't "hotlinked" - and there are no rules that say they should be. But it does illustrate how conditioned we've already become in how we expect Web sites to work.
The first section of the site deals with a letter's anatomy. Yes, not only do letters have "dots and crosses," they also have arms, spines, ears, beaks and tails. Rolling the cursor over each term highlights the applicable anatomical feature on some sample type below, while a second page devoted to measurements uses the same method to illustrate such differences as those between a character's X height and its Body height.
Classifications explains some of the categories into which the past 300 years of type have been divided. After choosing a style, visitors are taken to a bit of background information, and a click and hold feature which contrasts the construction of a chosen typeface to a single standard (in this case, Helvetica).
Hot Metal explores 10 typefaces that look good on the computer screen. Timeline is a small Shockwave presentation that starts back in simpler times (15000 BC) and traces "written" communication through pictographs, cuneiform tablets and the Rosetta Stone, to the inventions of today's common typefaces and Macintosh's "screen fonts." (Some entries provide images, and correlating historical events are also tracked so visitors can learn such useless titbits as the fact that Helvetica and Sputnik were launched the same year.) Finally, an interactive Glossary, and the Colophon - with additional links - round out the site.
Counterspace isn't likely to take up a great deal of your time, Of course, one hopes that it might also lead a few of us to learn to appreciate letters, as well as words.
Counterspace can be found at http://www.studiomotiv.com/counterspace/. Jim Regan provides 'Today's Links' to the e--Monitor. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.