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.
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.
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:
Microsoft are trying to get people interested in the old EOT embedded font format by submitting it to the W3C as an open standard. Font foundry Ascender Corporation are behind them. I think this wouldn’t be an issue now if Microsoft had submitted this as an open standard five years ago, but that it may be too late now that their rivals are going down the route of font linking.
A really nice example of how a site can look stunning despite being built without the use of images and with only a single font (and Times New Roman at that!): Seed Conference. Just amazing.
Bonus Update: Jeff Croft’s Typography: Beyond the Font [PDF]
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
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