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Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

kaikkonendesign.fi

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Re: Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

#11

Post by Silhouette »

josscrowcroft wrote: post #8

This is just lovely and very well-timed for people starting new year's resolution blogs next month :) Congratulations to the author. Would supplement it with this: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography.... And the super-handy related tool: http://www.pearsonified.com/typography/

As someone with a background in both mathematics and typography, I'm still trying to figure out how people come up with that sort of nonsense.

There are times when constants like the Golden Ratio are relevant and the exact value matters or some useful property doesn't apply. This is not one of those times. There is absolutely nothing "perfect" or "optimal" about the typography you'll create from this "solid mathematical basis", no matter how much TeX you use to typeset your equations or how many colours you put on a chart. In fact, with a lot of popular web fonts today, you'll get very dubious results.

That entire article is just a glorified troll, which I'm only responding to in case anyone impressionable reading your post otherwise thinks it's worth anything.

Re: Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

#15

Post by josscrowcroft »

Silhouette wrote: post #11
josscrowcroft wrote: post #8

This is just lovely and very well-timed for people starting new year's resolution blogs next month :) Congratulations to the author. Would supplement it with this: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography.... And the super-handy related tool: http://www.pearsonified.com/typography/

As someone with a background in both mathematics and typography, I'm still trying to figure out how people come up with that sort of nonsense. There are times when constants like the Golden Ratio are relevant and the exact value matters or some useful property doesn't apply. This is not one of those times. There is absolutely nothing "perfect" or "optimal" about the typography you'll create from this "solid mathemati…

Ok, ok, congrats on a very clever response, but you're missing the point. The key thing (and why I prefer the related tool, linked above) is whether or not the result looks good.

Is the article pseudo-intellectual and kind of wanky? Of course it is. It's the internet.

Does the resulting typography look good?

Re: Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

#16

Post by gnyman »

Very nice, I am just missing some references to some of your claims, for example that 65-90 characters is the perfect width . I can of course google it and find it but I think it would still be good to include it on the site.

Re: Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

#17

Post by peterevans »

gnyman wrote: post #16

Very nice, I am just missing some references to some of your claims, for example that 65-90 characters is the perfect width . I can of course google it and find it but I think it would still be good to include it on the site.

I think he mentioned 50-80 as the ideal measure. Here's one source that's pretty close in agreement (45-75, with 66 as an ideal): http://www.webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizonta...

Re: Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

#19

Post by tommikaikkonen »

gnyman wrote: post #16

Very nice, I am just missing some references to some of your claims, for example that 65-90 characters is the perfect width . I can of course google it and find it but I think it would still be good to include it on the site.

The measures you can try with the buttons (40, 65 and 90) are to see how the text looks on the edges of these guidelines (which I've written as 50-80 characters).

It's not a scientific number by any means, rather a general "consensus" derived from all the typography literature and articles I've read. The measure is not as simple as it seems, though; Readers seem to prefer a shorter measure while reading speed is actually increased with a longer measure, like shown in this study:

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLeng...

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