My first stylesheet of mine for NetNewsWire — and I suppose also PulpFiction — Hardcover · A classy NetNewsWire stylesheet.
This came to me more or less out of left field the other day. I was reading my beautifully typeset “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide” (an omnibus edition of all five stories in the world’s biggest trilogy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and a short story) and it occured to me that reading print is a totally different experience than reading, say, news in your RSS reader.
Serifs were all the rage when Gutenberg let loose on his first bible, and sans-serif fonts have until just recently, with the advent of decent anti-aliasing dominated on-screen fonts. Thus, the ubiquitous “11 pixel Verdana” styles. Strong accent colors, gradients, bar-across-the-top, pretty boxes. There’s certainly nothing wrong with them. But what if you could get something fundamentally different too?
That’s what Hardcover is - an attempt to look like a nicely typeset book. It works better than I would have thought for short entries (like the Linked List) and for image-heavy sites like Spamusement. Is it something you’ll tire of easily? I have no idea. But at least now it’s a nice option.