101–110 of 133 posts
Helvetica and you're done. ^ My one sentence guide to better typography.
That's your guide to better typography for OSX users. Then we also have folks using Windows and Linux that doesn't ship with Helvetica. Worth knowing!
Helvetica and you're done. ^ My one sentence guide to better typography.
My humble appendix wrt online typography ("-" means IM-not-so-HO): - If your font colour is more thant #333 on white, you're being cruel, especially to those who suffer astigmatism. - Make sure the font colour contrasts the background for prose. - Except from "fi" and "ffi", avoid ligatures in Latin scripts. They were useful when fonts were forged in metal and typesetting was manual labour. Dots may connect to serifs…
What's a dickbar?
It's 10 min yet also a nice guide: https://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.ht... Just love the book and his fonts :) I know it has been posted before, but I just had to ...
It looks like the author has chosen to "graylist" HackerNews in an attempt to sell copies of his book. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but warning you that anyone clicking on your link is actually redirected to https://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html
It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography is an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag. For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just…
Most typographic programs can perfectly understand "align leftmost pictures of title wit leftmost pixels of body".
>The ideal spacing is a function not only of what's being separated and by how much, but also the gradients that border it.
Only there's no real "ideal width". Not only it depends on the look of the heading font as well -- some designs might ask for more or less space, but it also depends on other elements on the page.
Even more so, it depends on the desired intent / impression, which might not be the same when typesetting a math book, a poetry book, a news article, a lifestyle article, a kids story, and so on.
It also varies by culture (country) and by era -- things people thought OK in 1660 look garish today, and even things people though OK in 1970 or 2006 can look out of place today.
At best, the "mathematics" can give something that more or less looks appropriate for certain situations -- TeX does that for math papers.
It doesn't and can't solve a soft science like typesetting in general (not without designer AI).
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/
A nice quick guide. Definitely eliminates a lot of experimentation when in hurry to get going. Here's a 10 second theory class: stick to the four principles of design - remember CRAP (not my theory though) - C: Contrast -> use contrasting design to make things that are supposed to be dissimilar look dissimilar. - R: Repetition -> repeat design patterns for similar items. Remember CSS? - A: Alignment -> don't leave an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that's more true for printed stuff than on the screen though. What makes you think that?
Sans-serif seems easier to read on a screen when the font-size is small. Maybe that's just me though.
> … it is better to use a sans-serif font for the body … because it is easier to read. I think that's more true for printed stuff than on the screen though.
It’s truer for the screen rather than the print.
For example, Kuffler units within the retina are triggered by the presence of intensity transitions so we have edge detection and enhancement happening very early in the visual system. We don't actually see edges as clearly as we think we do. A number of optical illusions are due to this fact.
It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography is an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag. For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just…
I agree that typography could be an exact science, but I think starting with mathematics would be the wrong choice. Rather, it would be better to devise perceptual experiments and back fit a mathematical model to the results. The excellent LAB color space was created this way. Scientists used experiments - for example the MacAdam ellipse to measure what colors are distinguishable - then backfit a model to that. It in…
We already have those results: thousands of existing fonts.
The fonts have all been manually optimized. It should be possible to back-fit the optimization process.