Unfortunately, for every person who is obsessed with even the tiniest details of typography, a dozen or so people seem to be indifferent. It’s a shame; if you’re going to spend time writing something, don’t you want it to look great and be easy to read?
That’s so true! A lot of people also seem to be indifferent to bad design in general, which is a shame because it can help to make an experience so much more pleasurable and easy to use.
With mobile being such a huge trend in web design and development at the moment making your website easier to read, navigate and use is even more important on those smaller screens. There’s some great tips from Smashing Magazine on how to make your website look and feel easier to use, navigation and most importantly.. read.
Fonts have always been pretty limited on the web, you can never rely on people having fonts installed, and you can’t even rely on many operating systems having the same fonts installed. Often this relied on specifying 2 or 3 fallback fonts for your website.
Due largely to the font embedding techniques available in CSS3 the use of different web fonts has exploded recently, however the area of licensing of these fonts is still a grey area. Many web font embedding services have sprung-up allowing you to legally embed fonts into your website.
Smashing Magazine has reviewed some of the more popular web font embedding services available.
Fonts were the great limiter of Web-Design, and always focused on designing for the lowest common denominator. Thankfully the @font-face tags in CSS are becoming more and more supported, and has helped to increase the possibilities for web design dramatically.
At the House of Type we’ve been doing more and more with custom fonts on web sites, and have found it incredible and using certain font formats, it’s even supported in IE6!
I love simple typographic designs for websites. However, I struggle to make them look good. These are some great tips on enhancing your typography led design and making it look more interesting.
A great showcase of how some of CSS3′s effects can be applied to headings, etc to make them look more interesting and pleasing.
Another great freebie from the folks at Smashing Magazine.