Since then I tried to educate myself, keeping up with the new stuff – which means buying a lot of books from amazon, and reading the interweb s. Hungarian publishers are not – or at least were not – too mad about this technology stuff, except when it comes to programming languages. The Gang of Four Design Pattern book took 9 years to publish here in Hungarian. But I digress.

I try to stay up to date, and try to make people improve where ever I go – especially with the “before coding” phases of the project, requirement gathering, design, etc. And then I like tools too. That’s why when Yanic asked if I would do a review of his Trace Modeler application I instantly said yes. And will publish the review the next week. But in the meantime I had a sudden idea – if I have this blog, why not write about UML an it’s use as I see it? I am reviewing a modeling tool that uses UML notations, so I could go a bit into the notation parts too. At the least, there will be some content on the blog. At the most some people get ideas.

It’s my blog, I work with UML, so noone can prevent me doing that. In the next couple of weeks – or, considering my writing speed, months – I will run a series of posts about UML and related stuff.

Whatever you have to design there are a lot of choices, different ones, aimed at different targets by company preference, ease of use, price, whatever.

And as it is, we usually end up with more than one tool to deliver our goal. By the time I publish this post I have used Darkroom, Windows Live Writer, GIMP, iMindMap and my web browser. When I work, I use Darkroom (thanks to Dosh Dosh), Enterprise Architect, iMindMap, Requisite Pro, MS Word, Excel, MS Project, or anything else that the current job – and the company – requires me to use.

And of course, I use the best design tool ever.

The best design tool has to support the design of different things from software to database to web layouts, pictures, web posts, novels, weekend programmes, in fact, it has to be good for the design of almost everything.

In addition the best design tool has the following important technical features:

1. It has to be easy to use.
2. Has to have a short learning curve.
3. Must support different notations – and in the same design
4. Must have a clean and simple user interface
5. It has to be distraction free
6. And a lot more…

Looking at this list, I realized that the best design tool is the paper+pencil combination. It’s pretty easy to use, it certainly has a clean and simple user interface, and at the same time you can design pretty much anything with it. You don’t have to upgrade it regularly, you don’t have to worry that it will get slow, you can use whatever notation and style you want, and on the same piece of paper.

You can fill half the paper with UML standard notations, the other half with screen design, then on the other side of the paper you can scribble formatted texts – using any kind of bulletin points, skulls or flowers if you want – and draw a mind map , and on top add an SSADM style entity life history, no limits. And you can mix it even, and put an association link between a UML class and a mind map. And of course you can decorate it easily.

There are a few problems with it of course: you need place to store the the results, and there is no copy paste function implemented – although, thinking about the amount of problem copy+paste generates it can be a benefit.

Best of all, the paper has no distracting features. Have you ever noticed that you sit down in front of your favourite – or company issued – designer programme, and after placing a few boxes and linking them you suddenly realize that in the last 10 minutes all you did was aligning them properly, and straightening the lines? And of course, colouring the boxes.

Then, in the middle of your thinking Skype beeps, and starts to blink in the task bar, and Outlook notifies you of an incoming e-mail which you start to read and next thing you know you are googling the answer to some question your boss asked you. Or your spouse. Or whatever. No such things with paper. No menus, icons, blinking and beeping.

And then there is creativity – when you drag a box on the screen, that’s all, you drag a box. When you draw it with your hand your brain starts to move and pick up the speed – at least, that’s what the smart ones say ¹ – and you have to concentrate more, pay attention more when you draw the shape than when you just drag it up.

My main problem with the paper is that people are prone to think you did nothing if there are no new files in the repository or the old ones are not updated. But that can be managed – most of the time. Of course there are people who claim that if it’s not in the machine it does not exist. Fortunately they are rare.

So I say you stick with the paper when you design. It’s convenient, easy to carry around, and when you have something that won’t make you cringe when you take a second look, you can sit down in front of your machine and copy it from the paper into your chosen programme. Sure, it takes time, but you already saved a lot of time by working with a more active and more creative mind, and not getting distracted by the “Check it out!! It’s hilarious” mails you got from your friends.

This post wouldn’t have been written if I weren’t asked so many times: What’s the best design tool for….

When I finally showed the head logo of the main page (heszroland.hu) to a friend he instantly critized the font set I used – distance beetwen letter, kernelling, and so on – and offered his help to play around with it. Naturally I accepted the offer and he returned me a better version, explaining what he did and what font-set he used.

I was very glad, but there was a few things I wanted to try/change, so I went to get the font set – Minion Pro. It turns out that you can get it from Adobe for 199.00 USD. Needless to say I did not buy it – it was cheaper to make the changes and send it back to my friend so he can do it with the right fonts.

But this prompted a longer discussion in the evening about the fonts, the prevalence of the Arial and other not-so nice looking default fonts, the price of the custom fonts, their general usability and so on.

The current situation is that you can set any kind of fonts for the texts of your website, but what will be displayed depends on the system of the people who see you website.

For example, if I buy the Minion Pro font set, and set it as the font used on my page you will see Arial most likely, unless you bought the font set too, and installed it on your computer.

As people don’t buy font sets, it is basically irrelevant what custom fonts you use for your site. This means, that not many people buy these font sets so the price is high.

What we would really need is – went my argument – is some kind of read only font types, which would be free, widely and frequently distributed and easily available. These read only font sets would be good only for displaying the fonts but not usable to edit and create new things – yes, probably in about 3 days there would be a method to “break” the read only property, but then you can download the font sets even today, so it’s not a problem.

That would mean that if I want to use some exotic font set for my website I could be pretty sure that the people who come to my site will see those exact letters. It would be an incentive for me to use these fonts. It would mean that a lot of people who are building quality websites would get these fonts because that would not be a useless effort.

And accidentally that would mean that instead of the current X professional designer lets say 100x people would buy the font – I think the 100x is not an over-, rather an underestimation, thus the price of the custom font could be much lower – which means te price of the font sets could be lowered.
When I go to Adobe, I see they sell font sets for an average of 35USD / type (35USD for bold capital, 35USD for italic regular, etc.).
The Chaparral font set has 8 types which cost 35USD apiece, 199USD for the whole set, the same for the Minion Pro.
If displaying custom fonts on web pages would be really easy and effective, and the interest in getting these fonts grown as a result, these could cost 1USD per type, or 5USD for a pack. Would you shell out 5 dollars to get a quality font for your website knowing that everyone can see the exact same fonts you put there?
I think a lot of people would.

Now, I am not 100% sure that this is the way with every font. But since the web content is growing, almost everyone and their dog is writing a blog, create a website, and I think a lot of people want a site that looks good, different, personal, etc., I think there is a growing market for everything that is needed for a good webdesign. Including custom fonts.
We had a pretty good discussion there, and agreed that it could be like that – if only there was the neccessary technology.

As life has it sometimes, next day ZenElements shared his new post on Plurk. I checked it out, and what a coincidence, the post is presenting the CSS3 technique: font embedding – btw, Alex has a whole series of pretty good posts on the CSS3 standard and their use. Check them out.
What it is about: basically with the use of the @font-face command you force the browser to use the font set that can be found on the hosting server. That means that I can use whatever font I want on my page, all I have to do is put the font file into the correct directory on your server and the browser will load it from there.

There are still a few problems with the solution:

1. Awfully slow.
2. So far only Safari supports the CSS3 standards, so it does not work with any other browsers yet.
3. There is no way – as far as I know – to check first if the user has the font on his PC to avoid the download if the answer is yes.

This is a way to achieve the “read only” font set. If the speed can be boosted somehow then it will be a really handy thing. Now the question is, whether it will prompt people to use more custom fonts, and the font sellers to lower their prices to attract more buyers.

I am not sure. But I hope it will happen – mainly because I don’t want to shell out 1,024.00 USD for a font set I will use occasionally.
A note for the end: this post does not want to appear comprehensive, and technical and all. Just some thoughts about a problem we ran into last week, and the resulting discussion, brainstorming.

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