Echquoooo

Hello Monday!

A friend (aaron) and I recently launched a new personal project called echquo (http://echquo.com). It is a quotation site. I won’t go too in depth explaining it – jump over there for a while and you’ll figure it out. Basically, you can add a quotation and pick what font you want to see it in.

Big challenge for us was to show the fonts. We all know about the limited typography palette of the internet (and how frustrating it can be for the aesthetically minded). There is the obvious solution: sIFR. It’s a great tool, but didn’t reach as far as we needed it to. It was limited to browser viewing only. We needed something that could extend to an rss feed as well as wallpaper creation – we needed to be creating an image.

Aaron deserves all the credit for this. He found http://us2.php.net/manual/en/book.image.php. By employing this php library we were able to create images on the fly with our set of fonts. For the way in which echquo uses it, it’s cleaner than sIFR and allows for the extra options we needed. (Don’t misunderstand me – it DOES create images. It is NOT a typography solution to the internet.)

As a lover of fine typography, we should band together and find a way to bring the art of the letter to the internet in an unrestricted form. Yeah?