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The Web Is All About Typography Period

by Oliver Reichenstein95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

Oliver Reichenstein from iA wrote a convincing article focusing on the theory behind good text and the idea that 95% of web design is typography.

Anatomy of Web Fonts

Andy HumeBut times change. Since the adoption of CSS into mainstream Web design, we have entered a new age of Web typography. This facet of design has been opened up to the Web designer in a way that wasn’t possible in the past. We now have the tools to return typography to its true role within the sphere of design.

In this article, Andy Hume from SitePoint goes into great detail on what makes a good typeface and how to use it in favor of your web site’s design. You will learn a lot of good typeface vocabulary in this one.

Compose to a Vertical Rhythm

Richard Rutter
“Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.” So says the typographer Robert Bringhurst, and just as regular use of time provides rhythm in music, so regular use of space provides rhythm in typography, and without rhythm the listener, or the reader, becomes disorientated and lost.

Eyes are very particular about the way they read text. Good line height and spacing is crucial to pleasing the eyeballs of your readers. Richard Rutter wrote this great article on 24 ways.

How to Size Text in CSS

Richard Rutter
Frequently asserted is the notion that good typography requires accurate control of font size and line-height. But this is the web: it’s a special medium where the reader can have as much control as the designer—the implication being that text on the web, while bending to the designer’s will, must also be reliably resizable across browsers and platforms.

A website is a continually changing organism that needs to shape and conform itself to accommodate each person viewing it. Apart from being rhythmic, text should also be elastic.

This is another article by Richard Rutter written for A List Apart.

The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters)

Peter K. Sheerin
The dawn of the web has frequently been compared to the invention of the printing press. But the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since Gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type.

Peter K. Sheerin goes into great detail on the the em’s, dashes, hyphens, spaces, encodings and much more in this article he wrote for A List Apart. May sound a little dull, but I guarantee you will learn something useful.