Traffic Digital

After fighting public transport I managed to get to this show last Sunday.

I’m glad I did. The dinosaurs were mostly huge and amazingly lively, the storyline was informative and entertaining.  It was narrated by the “Professor”, who commented and sometimes hid when things became too rough to his liking!

Some tasty dinosaurs

Of course I wondered how the special effects were being achieved. I looked for strings or wires and I noticed the motorised plank on which the dinosaurs were standing, but I quickly forgot about it

Perhaps I’m too sensitive, but seeing the nice herbivore Brachiosaurus, so huge but totally peaceful, ending up having its young eaten by stupid Liliensternus was in my opinion a sad way to start the show!

Then I also was sad for Old Torosaurus (looking quite alike to a Triceratops, but with only 2 horns) when he was beaten by Young Torosaurus and left the stage, moaning and horn broken, if not heart broken…

But whatever it was, the performance was breathtaking, with a really amazing stage being transformed as we were moving forward in time, with plants growing and then then curling up suddenly because of the volcanic heat…

I need to mention the flying Ornithocheirus which had to fly away to avoid being eaten, not to forget the mean Utahraptor that anyone having seen Jurassic Park knows he should fear!

And a last but not least, of course the T-rex was the biggest of all and came last, making me almost afraid as he roared at us!

I tried to take a picture (without flash because yes that was forbidden and even French people respect rules sometimes!), but the shock made me move and I ended up with a nice coloured blurry dot… Never mind, I don’t think I’ll have any problem remembering that scary mouth with enormous teeth!

The show is highly recommended - I am now convinced, as the professor told us, that “dinosaurs still walk the earth”!

I love typography. In fact, I regularly read typographica, to keep on top of emerging typographical trends. It comes as no surprise then that I get a little frustrated by the limited set of fonts available to most web projects. Traditionally, we’ve been limited to that all too familiar set of web safe fonts we all know so boringly well.

Here at Traffic, we’ve explored using many different technologies to get around this problem. We have used FLIR (not the best option), SIFR 2 and SIFR 3 (the latter being a huge improvement on the former and near enough to a good solution) and even just plain old -999em text indent on image headings. None of these solutions are really ideal and until @font-face is adopted by the IE team, we’re probably going to be faced with the necessity of replacing text to meet design requirements.

Luckily there is a neat solution that is gaining a lot of implementation: cufón. If you’ve never heard of cufón check out their site, it’s a lightweight, simple solution that does away with the latency of SIFR 3. It also adds the ability to create gradients and text-shadows and is cross browser compliment. Look out for future examples of work by us that uses this little design-tastic gem.

We’re happy to announce the re-launch of Slightly Foxed at www.foxedquarterly.com. Slightly Foxed is a quarterly journal for book lovers and “people who don’t want to read only what the big publishers are hyping and the newspapers are reviewing”.

It’s a great publication that we’re delighted to be associated with.