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Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

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Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#41

Post by dylan604 »

userbinator wrote: post #37
smrq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this argument unconvincing for the same reason that the answer to the musical loudness war isn't "turn your speakers down". When contrast is maximized 100% of the time, there's no room for emphasis.

I find your argument unconvincing too, because having your monitor set to a comfortable brightness was the norm before designers ignorant of brightness controls started ruining it for everyone else. The "musical loudness war" is completely irrelevant and makes no sense in this context either. Turn your speakers down if your ears are hurting.

>The "musical loudness war" is completely irrelevant and makes no sense in this context either. Turn your speakers down if your ears are hurting.

Recorded distorted sounds are still distorted regardless of your volume setting. Loudness war making people's ears hurt isn't solely due to the volume. If you can't tell the difference between piss poor mastering vs something properly mastered and being able to recognize them when you hear them is one of those "ignorance is bliss" things in life. However, once you can tell, you can't not hear it once it's present. The only way volume fixes it is when volume is set to 0.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#43

Post by jen729w »

xnx wrote: post #12

Typography 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.

That sounds really boring, so I’ll say no thanks.

The web isn’t just about the words. It’s about the look and the feel and the imagination.

Just like print was, and still is.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#44

Post by tarcon »

I read this article in 2006. Back then, it was set in the Georgia typeface at 16px font size. It looked great.

Now it's 32px and a custom font with some ornamentation.

For me the text appears to big to read without zooming out and the typeface looks medieval. If the purpose of typography is to "honour the content" (cf. Bringhurst), this does not seem to be a good example.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

tarcon wrote: post #44

I read this article in 2006. Back then, it was set in the Georgia typeface at 16px font size. It looked great. Now it's 32px and a custom font with some ornamentation. For me the text appears to big to read without zooming out and the typeface looks medieval. If the purpose of typography is to "honour the content" (cf. Bringhurst), this does not seem to be a good example.

[deleted]

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#46

Post by jsmith99 »

zerocrates wrote: post #28
MrVandemar wrote: post #14

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…

Beyond the choices of what to do with them, word processors also don't really try to educate or nudge users into how to do things. "Typewriter"-type usage, where the user makes all their changes directly as they type or on small selections, is still the dominant pattern of actual user behavior when the system is really built on shared styles geared to allowing you to make document-wide changes all at once. Ignoring t…

That’s not even the biggest advantage of styles - they have a semantic meaning. Eg headings show up in Word’s navigation pane or auto generated table of contents; or if you convert a word document into an epub using calibre and you used styles correctly then eg each top level heading will be a new chapter.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#48

Post by creesch »

zerocrates wrote: post #24
brailsafe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which arguments did you find puzzling? Everything seemed pretty relevant to me

I'd say the big standout would be the section on having only a few fonts to choose from, odd both in the current context generally where there's now a paralyzingly large number of fonts to choose from as a web designer, and also in the specific context of being presented on a site that's clearly using webfonts. The Internet Archive's closest look at the original [1] isn't quite from the day of but it's probably the s…

Interesting to see the original. To me, that one feels like a much clearer presentation of good typography. For example, in the "modern" version the first thing that crossed my mind is that ironically the quote at the start of the article isn't clearly presented as such. In the original it much clearer is presented as such.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#49

Post by fodkodrasz »

creata wrote: post #35

This site, and many other typography-adjacent sites, have comically large text on my desktop computer. What's up with that? (Maybe I've just misconfigured my browser.)

The cause is you got used to comically small text. That site is fine readable size (unlike the interface we are exchanging opinions on). Though it is still readable on 80% zoom, slightly eye straining on 70%, but it is far from oversized.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#50

Post by Pamar »

MrVandemar wrote: post #14

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…

...get at least baseline training in typography and layout. It should be a short high-school course. The basic rules are not that hard.

Can anyone suggest a concise book/course/video on this?

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