As I get ready to kick off a couple of personal web projects, I’ve been reading Enric Jardí‘s book, Twenty two tips on typography*, a primer on what works and what doesn’t in typography.
Although Jardí mainly works on type for print, most of the rules also apply to type for the web. In this article I’m going to highlight five of his tips which are useful in deciding upon the right type for a project.
Firefox 3.5 was released earlier today, and joins Safari in supporting the @font-face rule with OpenType and TrueType font families, allowing you to use a wider range of fonts in your designs (as long as they are correctly licensed, of course).
One slight drawback of the technique is the blank space that’s displayed as the new font is loaded into the browser; this is especially unnecessary for users who already have that font natively on their system.
The way to get around that is quite simple; use local() to check if the font is on the user’s system first.
With (standards-compliant) browser innovation firmly back on the agenda, there’s a lot of exciting new technology to get to grips with. This week, Google have thrown their weight firmly behind HTML5, while a new start-up aims to bring web fonts to all.
I’m at home with the flu at the moment, so taking the opportunity to un-star some items in Google Reader; this post is a link-dump with a little added comment.
A few of them have been in my favourites for a couple of months, so apologies if you’ve seen them already.
I’ve been doing quite a lot of site mapping recently, and looking for a way to escape the standard boxy top-down view. In searching for examples of different ways to present the information, that are pleasing to look at but still immediately convey meaning, I found a number of interesting examples.
Below are the pick of the results, along with a few that don’t quite work, and some old standbys. I wanted to include images to illustrate this, but in most cases the license didn’t allow.
Following the recent push by Microsoft and Ascender to revive the EOT format for web fonts, debate has raged over the pros and cons of the two main alternatives: embedding and linking. Richard Rutter came up with the idea to license fonts on a monthly payment basis, with the font being served from the supplier’s server (or a trusted alternative).
I think there are a number of potential problems of practicality with that approach, many of which have been raised in the comments. As a contribution to the debate, I would like to offer the following suggestion:
Usually when I attend @media (that is, on two previous occasions) I write a follow-up blog post on what I saw there. Well I attended this year, and I’ve written the post, but it’s on the blog of my employer, Preloaded: HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media.
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