Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leatherman

In Case You Missed It: 2014

January 01, 2015

Series: 2023, 2022, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013

Rather than a bunch of individual “In Case You Missed It” tweets, I thought I’d repeat what I did last year and just do one big yearly semi-comprehensive recap of the web community things that I contributed to this year. Enjoy!

Font Family Reunion Project

Watch on YouTube

Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts Blog Post

I’m lucky that Todd Parker asked me to research this topic for a Filament Group blog post. This really set in motion a series of things that I was really excited to investigate: accessibility, font loading, mobile Unicode character support, et cetera. So many great things snowballed from this.

See also this tweet from @filamentgroup.

CSSConf Talk

Luckily the success of the blog post above turned into a speaking opportunity! I had the honor of speaking about Icon Fonts at CSSConf in 2014.

Watch on YouTube

Dev.Opera Blog Post

I transitioned from focusing on icon fonts with @font-face and instead moved to talk more about generic font loading. There was a fair amount of overlap between this and the CSSConf talk.

SmashingConf Talk

This was definitely the highlight of the year for me. A super professional conference in a beautiful location—Whistler! A huge thank you to Vitaly and Tim and all the staff for having me along. It was really a unique conference with lots of personality. The videos have not yet been published—but soon you’ll get to see me try to get a crowd of 300 people to do the flashback arm waving sequence from Wayne’s World.

Stop Using SVG in @font-face

The Pastry Box Blog Post

I wrote a guest blog post for The Pastry Box about Impostor Syndrome. You might have noticed that the content of this post was very similar to my 2013 talk at BarCamp Omaha. See also this tweet from June 9.

BarCamp Omaha Talk

Watch on YouTube

Attended Thunderplains

Mike Taylor was really on point with his suggestion to attend this one. It was a great event put on by some really special individuals.

Guest on the Word-Break Podcast

My first ever podcast interview!

Filament Group Collaborations

Font Loading

A little bit different than the approach I’ve been putting into my presentations.There may just be an official Filament Group blog post forthcoming talking all about this.

In related news to support the Filament Group font loading approach, we worked on a WOFF2 feature test using the CSS Font Loading API:

Tablesaw

A set of plugins for responsive tables (Filament Group Blog Post). This one kind of caught fire on GitHub, hitting #4 on GitHub’s most popular repositories (all programming languages) for the month of June 2014.

Politespace

An accessible alternative to input masks that adds whitespace for readability to form fields (Filament Group Blog Post).

Shoestring

We worked hard on this lightweight DOM utility library that shares a subset of the jQuery API.

Top Five Jokes (by Retweets)

(In response to @SenTedCruz)

Thank You!

I owe everyone a huge thank you for giving me the amazing opportunities that I had in 2014. To everyone at NebraskaJS—the community we have in Omaha (and growing in Lincoln) is amazing. To Nicole Sullivan and company for taking a chance on me at CSSConf. To Tim Kadlec for also taking a chance on me for Smashing Conference. And most of all to my employer and coworkers at Filament Group. The list above would’ve been much shorter without their collaboration with and support of our great community. I’m feeling thankful—it was a great year.


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Zach Leatherman IndieWeb Avatar for https://zachleat.com/is a builder for the web at IndieWeb Avatar for https://cloudcannon.com/CloudCannon. He is the creator and maintainer of IndieWeb Avatar for https://www.11ty.devEleventy (11ty), an award-winning open source site generator. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 79 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of Netlify, Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS. Learn more about Zach »

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