101–103 of 103 posts
My 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can agree with the parent comment that the typography on that page is atypical and not in a good way. Too large to make it easily readable on mobile, not enough margin. Perhaps that's forgivable since it was written 17 years ago before the mobile era. But even in desktop mode, size of typefaces jumps around for seemingly no real reason. Repeated use of the same graphic of historical typesetting for no apparent reas…
No idea what it looked like in 2006 (what domain did they use before ia.net?), but here’s it in 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170322053052/https://ia.net/to... . No ridiculously large text, no gratuitous/injudicious hero image (inappropriately chosen automatically for legacy content and not reviewed or excluded), no gross inflation of low-size images (“mobile-first”), just basic sensible design. It’s the usual,…
Now look at a typical web page. It is scrolled! Nothing is stable. On every move everything changes. There is not a single visually fixed anchor aside from the browser window itself, which is unhelpful anyway. (E.g. with all that talk about semantic HTML it could maybe give us a standard table of contents, but does it?) With such a drastic departure from the essence of typography some fancy hanging punctuation won't help. Of course, once the main things are in place, it would be nice to have typographical niceties as well.