Most websites are crammed with small text that’s a pain to read. Why? There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small. So…
A manifesto from 2006 that's still valid. For me, it took Instapaper to finally understand what's so wrong with most of the content websites on the internet. Including my own.
Worse than those misguided and patronising metaphors is the fact that publishers can no longer decide which typeface to set their text in. Apple provides just five (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times, Verdana), and only one of them (Palatino) can be considered a book face suitable for reading on a screen. Somehow, there seems to be a weird dichotomy between cool aluminium shapes, high-tech displays and amazing technology on the one hand, and wooden bookshelves on the other, as a metaphor for an online bookshop. Perhaps the design departments responsible should talk to each other? Or does Steve Jobs not have such great taste after all?
Erik Spiekermann's critical view on digital typography.
Webkit, the engine under the Safari and Chrome browsers, adds an interesting property to CSS called “font-smoothing”.
At this point this property looks more harmful than useful to me, but it's still there.
Of course, good typesetting is something more than selecting a series of sizes, just as music consists of something more than well-chosen notes. Rhythm, in particular, enables a sequence of notes to beat with musical life, and tempo sustains their wit. It is much the same for the world of letters.
An excellent and practical explanation of typographic rhythm in web design.
As you might have known, I am a huge fan of Typekit. Beyond offering beautiful font licensing on the web, they do a great job of educating the user.
On good choice of type. As we're no longer limited to narrow set of “web fonts”, this decision is more important and difficult than before.
Very often the design of free fonts suffer from typical beginners’ mistakes: awkward proportions, poor thick-thin contrast, missing optical corrections, clumsy transitions from curves to straight lines and inversely, ill-balanced and misshapen letter forms, … we can go on and on. Before using a free font, make sure to carefully evaluate the complete character set for quality and consistency.
In-depth analysis of some free font designs.
That being said, however, typographical choices should always work to support a design, and when a font becomes too popular, that very popularity can begin to undermine that support.
Complains about free fonts becoming too popular. Well... that's the way life is. Using inappropriate or obscure typeface just for the sake of it is much bigger crime, in my opinion.
