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Five minute guide to better typography

pierrickcalvez.com

31–40 of 133 posts

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#32

While visiting a newspaper for a project, I heard them talk about how it is better to use a sans-serif font for the body and a serif for the heading because it is easier to read. I think that's more true for printed stuff than on the screen though.

On the contrary, serif is easier to read in print.

Source: I've worked with magazines and newspapers.

Just check any newspaper or magazine, they all use serif.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#33

I have persistently encountered the same problem in this space. Most people I've worked with write documents using the last formatted document they made as a template for the next. Tracing back through their history of documents you find that they are all based off one person who decided it was a good idea to mix fonts and colours of headings, and mess around with font sizes and then save it all as default heading an…

Latex is too hard for mortals, but I’d suggest Sphinx or one of the markdown alternatives. I think atlassian confluence is another even friendlier alternative, with a price tag.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#34
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 not understood by the program.

More complex, the amount of space under a heading. A heading's bottom is neither its bottommost pixel (the space between the bottom of an "a" and "g" is mostly empty), nor its baseline (that space isn't entirely empty); it has a soft bottom, a fade to emptiness. The ideal spacing is a function not only of what's being separated and by how much, but also the gradients that border it.

Does anybody know of good resources on this subject? What I find tends to be more about habit than derivation.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#35
post #34

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…

As far as I know, the people behind thegrid.io have put a lot of thought into constraint-based design, they may have some insight into ‘the rules’.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#36
post #34

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 involves a bunch of cube roots and funny constants, not something you'd reach from a standpoint of mathematical purity. But it works really well.

So if you were looking at rigorously defining typography, I'd look at quantifying how spread out a pattern of ink needs to be before it looks smaller (aligning I and L might not be the leftmost pixel). I'd also look at quantifying some of the gestalt laws of grouping.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#37

I have persistently encountered the same problem in this space. Most people I've worked with write documents using the last formatted document they made as a template for the next. Tracing back through their history of documents you find that they are all based off one person who decided it was a good idea to mix fonts and colours of headings, and mess around with font sizes and then save it all as default heading an…

Latex is too hard for mortals, but I’d suggest Sphinx or one of the markdown alternatives. I think atlassian confluence is another even friendlier alternative, with a price tag.

Tools won't make people care, but they can help produce consistent documents.

Atlassian Confluence is a horrible recommendation; it has few tools for typesetting, PDF export is very mediocre and hard to control (there is a plugin that allows you to control pagination), and I once found something that was impossible to produce in its markup (my workaround was to insert a zero-width character and hope no one copied it into a terminal).

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#39
post #34

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 disagree completely, typography is an artform and therefore completely subjective. I actually preferred the unaligned header example. Sometimes there is a lot of white-space that makes people perceive things to be aligned. Often perfectly aligned text calls for something unaligned to stand out.

There may be a scientific approach to finding the best typography to convey information to a specific group of people but it will never be an exact science or a mathematical formula that will work universally.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#40
post #19

I only see a white page when i open the link...

It's almost all images / gifs, maybe they failed to load or you have them blocked?

I was thinking it would be interesting to recreate the site with CSS but the animations that show the before and after state change might prove tricky.

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