Typography on the web, what's good what's not?

[angelize]

More and more with @font face and Google fonts typography is becoming an important part of website designs. What makes for good typography in a webpage? What doesn't? What are your thoughts?

[gwpriester]

Type that is designed to be read.

I am not as concerned about using Garamond Pro Light Italic as I am making sure that visitors can read the text. And I am not all that sure that most visitors expect a typographic tour de force.

Type that is as long as the width of this text box but the same size is harder to read at this wide a measure as this text is at this size.

Type that is as long as the width of this text box but the same size is harder to read at this wide a measure as this text is at this size.

[steve.ledger]

More and more with @font face and Google fonts typography is becoming an important part of website designs.

I've always understood that Typography is a term for print rather than web site viewing.

[mwenz]

Well, quite literally it is "writing on the surface" and so typography fits with display as well as print.

Frances, here's a link you may enjoy:
http://designmodo.com/typography-web-design/

Typography on the web still has many challenges that time will likely overcome. One day, gone will be headings in images only. I'm not too keen on using @fontface yet, though I have played around. I would like to see speed issues more equalized for people's connections, etc.

Take care, Mike

[angelize]

Gary: I agree readability is a top concern, because if your visitors find your site hard to read they aren't going to stick around.
Steve: I think Typography is becoming more prominent on the web, when you design a site how do the text and headings work to give the site a certain feel?
Mike: that link was very interesting, and the examples of sites that make good use of typography were inspiring. Thanks

[steve.ledger]

Steve: I think Typography is becoming more prominent on the web, when you design a site how do the text and headings work to give the site a certain feel?

I actually don't. In fact more than ever less is more and when you look at professionally designed sites you'll note that they do not have umpteen different fonts faces on every page. As Gary pointed out, "most visitors don't expect a typographic tour de force.", and this is spot on advice.
Of course, if your website is actually about fonts, then this is a different kettle of fish. But using other fonts for the body text, navbars and so on just because you can may not be a wise choice. But I do agree that we can (and do) choose a nice typeface relevant to the site for logos and banners.

[angelize]

I agree with what you are saying, too many fonts on one page is not in my opinion good typography. Good typography should be more about how you use fonts not about how many you use. By mixing say 2 or 3 fonts on a page if they are chosen well can make a good composition. Say you are doing a site for a restaurant and you have a nice script for the headings and then contrast that with a clean sans serif font for the body text and navbars you could still get creative with different weights, and sizes. Choosing fonts that play nice together is important too, contrast is good but not when they clash with each other.

[Gare]

The use of embedded fonts on a website is no more a tour de force for a visitor than an embedded Flash file. Think of where cutting edge sites were 3 years ago, and then project where they will be in another 3 years.

Color, plug-ins, choice of fonts, wrap-around text, all this stuff is window dressing—it can coax a visitor towards "the thing", but it's not "the thing", as Shakespeare wrote, "The play's the thing." If an effect is used well, appropriately, not gratuitously of for wont of a solid concept, then it can be like seasoning to a meal that's already good—and effect can enhance it.

If fancy fonts or pootsy Flash animations are the heart and soul of a website, they're the star and there is no real content to point to, then it's what we used to call in advertising "dancing baloney (bologna)".

All sizzle and no steak.

—Gary

[Gare]

Steve—

The fact that large corporate sites are telling their hired designers to go with a "Spartan Look", can be viewed as a copycat copying a copycat, Adobe started doing Minimalist and then someone else though it was trendy and followed their lead.

"Clean" is a "look"; professional...erm, well, yes as of 11am today, but aesthetics tend to follow a trend, unless one is a truly original power-broker in the field of web graphics. If you subscribe to the graphics newsletter LinkedIn offers members, they have a very good round-up of what's happening in all countries around the world with trendy design.

But when all's told, websites aren't all that different than other parcels for the dissemination of content, at least where design is concerned. We'd all be reading html if Marc Andreessen hadn't introduced the image tag in NetScape Navigator. Clearly we're not, and clearly we can deduce that people who surf like graphics and they're comfortable with website paradigms that imitate deliver forms they're familiar with, such as magazines and newspapers.

Bear with me here: the use of more than 2 or three fonts, fonts that have family members, is usually just bad design, whether it's online or on the printed page. So I'd like to discourage creative people from using every font on their system in a design as a general rule, not exclusively to using fontface. And as a general rule, a truly experienced design could indeed use, say 13 different fonts in a design and it could look swell. Rules are meant to be broken, but only those who have a profound understanding of rules can break them with beauty and coherence.

The thing I appreciate about fontface is that let's be real—everyone and their sister has used a bitmap of a font not supported in navigators to get it there for whatever reason. And this blows accessibility, Google won't search the page for that word, and fontface is a really good and friendly alternative if you have to use a font outside of the given 13 or so all browser support.

My Best,

Gary

[Gare]

I'm not too keen on using @fontface yet, though I have played around. I would like to see speed issues more equalized for people's connections, etc.

Take care, Mike

I can't offer any empirical numbers on a website that uses embedded fonts versus the same website that doesn't use fontface, but realistically, a site that's "clean" of plug-ins and preloads has to load and run faster than an "encumbered" website, right?

So it begs that a site that does use fontface, does so wisely and with meaning.

The USA is behind just about all the European countries with bandwidth, but the trend is definitely toward speed, which somewhat alleviates preload stuff, and consider this: Google is perhaps the largest company that stands the most to lose when a web page doesn't load quickly. You can't search what you can't load, right? And yet the largest proponent of fontface is...Google.

-g-