Typographic Web Design

Book excerpt: Learn how to use typography on the web Typography has long been an invaluable tool for communicating ideas and information. Words and characters once impressed in clay, written on papyrus, and printed with ink are now manifest in pixels of light. Today's web typographers can help their readers find, understand, and connect with the words, ideas, and information they seek. Thus, legibility and readability are the foundations for the typographic theories and practice covered in Typographic Web Design. You'll learn how to choose fonts, organize information, create a system of hierarchy, work with tabular information, create a grid, apply a typographic system across multiple pages, and build a font library. Each chapter provides time-tested typography rules to follow (modified for the web), explains why they work, when to break them, and offers the opportunity to test the rules with hands-on exercises in HTML and CSS. If you don't know HTML and CSS, Typographic Web Design provides a walk-through for each lesson, showing you how to plan and write syntax. Readers are sure to come away with an understanding of typographic principles, as well as the HTML and CSS skills needed to implement them on the web. Typographic Web Design •Applies decades of typographic theory and practice (e.g., how to choose a font) directly to web design (e.g., how to use the @font-face property in CSS). •Clearly explains all typographic rules presented, providing examples that contrast successful and less successful typographic solutions. •Is written for visual thinkers. The book is supported by a web site with solutions, critiques, and revisions for each lesson. Laura Franz is an Associate Professor of Design at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she has taught web typography for 12 years. She has presented lectures and workshops on Typographic Web Design, and has written a course on the topic for Lynda.com.