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?
Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
51–60 of 103 posts
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#52My 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…
Yeah, just another niche high school course that everyone should follow, that’s what our schools need
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, al…
Typography is still important, but I'm saying interactivity is even more important yet still is a blindspot for most designers. You can imagine two websites, one with subpar typography but excellent responsiveness and interactivity, and the other with excellent typography but is slow and interactions are confusing or don't work perfectly. It's not hard to see interactivity wins. Many UIs are notorious for bad typogra…
I suppose you (or perhaps designers) are thinking of interactivity in the opposite order as I am, as though it's a sensible or a necessary step to position some possibly janky animation in-between the visitor/user and what they're trying to accomplish, and it's sufficiently high-risk as to actually cause problems. I initially couldn't think of how some piece of UI would actually ship even though it posed a risk to the user's experience, but now that I do think about it, it's always been a top-down decision, less that of an actual designer; usually it's a bunch of pointless dropdowns or sliders that just weren't given any thought, and engineers or designers were told to do it because 2 weeks gotta go fast gotta ship. There can be some really bad offenders out there, I've worked on fixing them, I just usually attribute that to pointless pressure to build specific things, where implementation details are removed from the agency of their rightful craftspeople.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#54I 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.
Same. Not every webpage needs to look like stripe’s homepage.
Guess what. Simplistic typography is also still typography.
Just like design or VFX in films people tend to think about typography when they notice it is there. But good design/VFX/typography is often invisible.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#55This 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.)
My theory is that these designers use very large displays with very high resolutions and put them meters away from their eyes.
Although, I'm not sure how they can read text on UI elements at the same time.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But the problem with the loudness war isn't the loudness per se, but the loss of dynamic range: if everything is as loud as it can be, there is no room for emphasizing anything. It's like, if you are always shouting, you can never raise your voice. Which is exactly what is happening with full contrast websites: if everything is at max contrast, there is no room for emphasis.
There is room for emphasis: bold text, colors, different font, …
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#57It is a bit ironic that the website has white text on black background which is no-no on screens as the very high contrast creates ghosting and eye strain / hurt for many people. Carefully read the text, then look at anywhere else and you'll see ghost lines everywhere for a few minutes. So the text should at least be gray-ish to decrease the contrast if you want to go that way. This works pretty well on paper, but su…
The link you posted is exactly how I normally read every webpage – I have Dark Reader set up to make all text white on a black background. Light backgrounds make my eyes bleed and I actively avoid working with software that forces them on me.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But the problem with the loudness war isn't the loudness per se, but the loss of dynamic range: if everything is as loud as it can be, there is no room for emphasizing anything. It's like, if you are always shouting, you can never raise your voice. Which is exactly what is happening with full contrast websites: if everything is at max contrast, there is no room for emphasis.
Printed text does just fine using maximum contrast all the time, and bold and italics for emphasis.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#59Typography 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.
Fancy typography is the realm of magazines, not books, and I can't think of a single magazine that's stuck in my memory the way real books do. If you have to use fancy typography to make your text feel more interesting it probably isn't worth reading.
Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
#60It is a bit ironic that the website has white text on black background which is no-no on screens as the very high contrast creates ghosting and eye strain / hurt for many people. Carefully read the text, then look at anywhere else and you'll see ghost lines everywhere for a few minutes. So the text should at least be gray-ish to decrease the contrast if you want to go that way. This works pretty well on paper, but su…
The link you posted is exactly how I normally read every webpage – I have Dark Reader set up to make all text white on a black background. Light backgrounds make my eyes bleed and I actively avoid working with software that forces them on me.
I am not talking about dark / light mode difference. I too prefer dark mode in everything I use. Dark mode does not mean highest contrast text on black background though.