Tuesday, 13 March 2007 @ 1000
Mark Boulton, Owner, Mark Boulton Design
Richard Rutter, Production Dir, Clearleft Ltd
Presentation link: http://webtypography.net/sxsw2007/
typography: the mechanical notation and arrangement of language
[See the List Apart article about em and en dashes – http://alistapart.com/articles/emen/]
Tools: Smartypants (http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/) and TextStyle for blogging engines
In headings and titles, use the best possible ampersand. Look at Simplebits span wrap of ampersands — cool.
Vertical rhythm
- Reading the page down needs a regular rhythm.
- Determine a base text size and a rhythm size
- [See presentation to find all their equations and look them over]
- Subtitles get 1.5 a rhythym unit above and 0.5 below
Layout
- Grids based upon em.
- Elastic em-based layout.
- (Me: If only people could buy displays that have resolutions described in em. 🙂
Fonts and typefaces
- Arial is not a good cascade backup to Verdana
- Example: frutiger, univers, helvetica neue, arial, helvetica, sans-serif
- Fonts new and standard in Vista: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Contantia, Corbel
- Hopefully the above typefaces will be shipping with the next version of Office for the Mac
Conclusion
- Web typography sucks because there is less caring.
- Much of the content is spit out of automated systems, also.
My lingering thoughts
- While implementing good typography is a noble goal, the democratization of web content will erode these ideals.
- What about swfir (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/02/introducing-swfir)
Book: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst (link)