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Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
11–20 of 103 posts
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#12Typography should be left to the user agent and user style sheet.
Attempts to make sites "pixel perfect" is the worst habit from the print-world that designers brought online with them.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#13Not anymore, maybe back when static sites were common. Web sites now are applications with lots of interactivity. The interactive design is often lost because designers are mostly designing for static layouts, with interactivity falling lower in priority. This then becomes a bad experience with developers having to constantly fix interactivity issues that were born from lack of design and product specs.
>Web sites now are applications with lots of interactivity.
You should prefix that with "some", or even "most". But certainly not all of them. There are plenty of static sites still around from yesteryear, and plenty still being made today.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#14My contention is that not only web-designers, but everyone who uses a word processor should get at least baseline training in typography and layout. It should be a short high-school course. The basic rules are not that hard.
It's possible to make decent looking documents in Microsoft Word / Libre Office / Abiword / whatever, but people with no idea what they're doing (and no idea that they have no idea what they're doing) easily create monstrous abominations that communicate nothing beyond "unprofessional" and scream "I have the aesthetic taste of a 3 year old".
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#15(2006) In case you, like me, miss the dateline at the top and become more and more puzzled by the arguments and examples presented. I will credit the article for using examples that are still visually appealing today, even (especially?) the 2004 blog.
Which arguments did you find puzzling? Everything seemed pretty relevant to me
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#16Not anymore, maybe back when static sites were common. Web sites now are applications with lots of interactivity. The interactive design is often lost because designers are mostly designing for static layouts, with interactivity falling lower in priority. This then becomes a bad experience with developers having to constantly fix interactivity issues that were born from lack of design and product specs.
>Web sites now are applications with lots of interactivity. You should prefix that with "some", or even "most". But certainly not all of them. There are plenty of static sites still around from yesteryear, and plenty still being made today.
Interactivity is important if interactivity is important, and should be given the attention it deserves, but JavaScript people have always wanted to believe it's always more important than the fundamentals of text-based information, which I'd argue it rarely surpasses in importance.
People like to conveniently forget that even if you're building a richly interactive thing that's better described as an application, all your buttons, labels, chart legends, street names, links, table data cells, blog posts, confirmation boxes, error messages, form fields, comment threads, settings screens, profile names, notifications, product specs, and many more components are going to be text, and should be treated as the venerable vehicle for information that text is. Sometimes it isn't as important as other aspects, but a great foundation in typography will allow for someone to produce great results with less resources.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#17(2006) An article about the importance of typography uses massive, unreadable font at 25px.
And with ink traps in the title font.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#18I admire all the work the typographers do to make amazing-looking websites, and yet I prefer to read sites (like mathpages, or Dan Luu's site) which have next to no styling. They're just easier for me to read. I'm definitely not hating, but I feel like it's good to keep in mind where the point of diminishing returns is.
The practice of typography includes everything from the very basic of readability of body text to headlines to how everything is laid out on a page, and sometimes that means doing as little as possible, because the defaults are often great.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#19My contention is that not only web-designers, but everyone who uses a word processor should get at least baseline training in typography and layout. It should be a short high-school course. The basic rules are not that hard. It's possible to make decent looking documents in Microsoft Word / Libre Office / Abiword / whatever, but people with no idea what they're doing (and no idea that they have no idea what they're d…
True. Typographic scales, proportion, and a few other subjects would prove generally valuable for many.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#20As true then as it is now. It's rare, even with highly interactive applications, that text isn't a fundamental component of your website or application.