I found the details here a bit overkill – something about the amount of mixins dependencies gives me some mild concern about code bloat. But once I started paging through the raw CSS logic there’s a lot of great ideas here, from a non uniform line height to not using pure black and a custom look for ampersands.
The FontFeed‘s Yves Peters looks at typographic choices made on poster art for recent Hollywood releases. Interesting to see the ubiquitous Helvetica Neue put to both great (Zero Dark Thirty) and not so great (Django Unchained) use.
As designer Oliver Reichenstein wrote years ago, 95% of web information is text. Text has to look good, and the right font face is a big part of that. But given the virtually infinite set of web fonts to pick from, where do we start? Here’s a few recommendations from what I’ve learned.
I split web typography into three categories: body, headline and accent text (i.e. everything that doesn’t fit neatly into a standard headline plus paragraph flow.) In the early stage of web design one category tends to dominate overall textual content; in almost all cases it’s the body text. Decide the right font face for this category first. This decision makes the rest of your font selections easier; by then you’ve already settled on a font on a your users will interact with the most.
Great web text is aesthetically pleasing and matches the creative style of the site or application behind it. None of that matters if the body font face, the workhorse of web text, is hard to read. Check out body text samples on multiple browsers, multiple devices. How is the font hinting? Be sure to check out samples on IE8 and IE9, where poorly hinted fonts often fall apart. Generally when I’m stuck between two body font faces I’ll go with the more readable option.
There’s a reason many very well designed sites and apps stick with one font; multiple font faces need to contrast against each other to play well. Also every font you add has to match the site’s mood or style. That can generate a lot more research and testing. When in doubt, or if design time is limited, stick with a single font face and play with font weights for proper contrast.
I still see web guides recommending a single font size as a base for body text like 12px or 14px. Times have changed: there’s a huge range (desktop, tablet, phone) in web connected devices, some of which appreciate a slightly bumped up font size. Custom font faces often look best one or two pixels bigger or smaller than you might first expect. Experiment. When debating between several sizes, pick one that fits roughly 45 to 75 characters per line (including spaces) to maximize readability.
I really enjoyed watching Jason’s talk. He starts out illustrating how the right font face matters. Pay special attention to last twenty or so minutes where he runs through a few quick tips on font selection (e.g. when in doubt between two font sizes, bigger is better.)
FF Meta and Myriad makes for a a pretty rare web pairing (for that matter, Myriad solo is pretty underutilized), but Ev Williams’ Medium does the job right.
From Mac/iOS app developer Bjango’s blog, a solid primer on why sub-pixel antialiasing – still fairly common on Chrome and the PC world – is on its way out. This part really surprised me:
WebKit on OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when animating, often resulting in a visual glitch when it starts and stops, unless standard antialiasing is set using CSS. OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when using CoreAnimation’s layer backed views.
Now I know why some of my CSS3 font animations can run a bit off; turns out it was for good reason.
Cross browser, flexible custom icon web fonts. Just throw your SVG files in a subdirectory, run a command line prompt and you’re good to go. I haven’t directly tested this myself, but this could be a very useful tool.
This is awesome idea: take the already sound idea of throwing a bunch of icons and symbols into a single web-friendly font set and then make them easy to use by invoking the symbols with common terms (e.g. an HTML list item with the word ‘home’ gets replaced by a home icon.) Perhaps most importantly, every set on the site looks great. At $30 to $60 each, it’s a pretty affordable option as well.
From Font Bureau:
The digital version of Helvetica that everyone knows and uses today is quite different from the typeface’s pre-digital design from 1957. Originally released as Neue Haas Grotesk, many of the features that made it a Modernist favorite have been lost in translation over the years from one typesetting technology to the next.
Type designer Christian Schwartz has newly restored the original Neue Haas Grotesk in digital form – bringing back features like optical size variations, properly corrected obliques, alternate glyphs, refined spacing, and more.
Really interesting work here. Be sure to check out the features page to see the subtle (yet significant) differences between Neue and the default Helvetica.
I really enjoyed this extended design post by Mark Boulton. What’s awesome is the specificity here: detailed recommendations for characters per line to maximize readability, how to avoid hanging punctuation and much more.