[HN Gopher] The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web ___________________________________________________________________ The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web Author : omarfarooq Score : 62 points Date : 2021-09-03 09:40 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (webtypography.net) (TXT) w3m dump (webtypography.net) | PaulHoule wrote: | I do a lot of work with print lately and manual kerning has been | a revelation to me. | | I use to go through hundreds of typefaces like going through | hundreds of photos on Tinder and think 'they all suck' but then I | started adjusting the letter spacing and now I 'love the one I'm | with'. | | I recently developed an unofficial corporate identity for my | workplace (improving signage) that uses serif fonts. All the | other signs use sans-serif which is half because it fits the | modernist building and half because people don't know how to do | the manual kerning it takes to make serif fonts pop. | | That said I have felt no need to kern for the web and have no | desire since it will certainly go bad if the user isn't seeing | the typeface I want them to see. | wffurr wrote: | I didn't get very far in this because the body type is set too | small to read on a smartphone screen. | jkepler wrote: | On my smartphone, a simple doubletap on the body text and it | zooms in to the text, full-width on the screen, and is thus | readable and beautifully typeset. | Y-bar wrote: | This. | | And _nothing_ looks tappable/clickable either. A prime example | why the web is an interactive medium, different from print. | [deleted] | smlacy wrote: | Couldn't figure out how to navigate past the title page on my | phone, so I gave up. | cblconfederate wrote: | What does typography have to do with the web? There seems to be | nothing here of value that is based on evidence about the | readability of text. Especially in today's era where the medium | is not fixed, it makes zero sense to treat the web as a PDF. | arglebarglegar wrote: | if you read any of this you'd realize that's not what's being | suggested... it's about making informed decisions about how you | style text with css | | typography is generally involved with any text, many of these | are standards that have existed for hundreds of years and still | exist on computers | sonofhans wrote: | Typography has everything to do with the web. Web design is 90% | typography (cite below). Typography is not about perfectly or | reverently setting text in immutable ways (viz your "PDF" | comment). Typography is about encouraging and aiding | readability, and allowing a piece of writing to have a | subtextual voice. See, for example, the posts about Arctic | Adventure (https://www.arctic81.com/). The typography on that | site is harder to read than I'd like, but does absolutely put | you in the time and place that the author wants. | | Jeffrey Zeldman said (in 2015): | | "Mobile is today's first screen. So design responsively, | focusing on content and structure first. Websites and apps | alike should remove distractions and let people interact as | directly as possible with content. 90 percent of design is | typography. And the other 90 percent is whitespace." | | (Zeldman knows his shit. He was one of the most influential | designers and standards-setters for the early web, e.g., | founder of the Web Standards Project, which was instrumental in | helping us escape the minefield of browser-specific | customizations in the late 90s). | | Most of the principles of good typography apply anywhere that | type can be used, from books to billboards to websites to | mobile games. Typography as a discipline is thousands of years | old, and based in the fundamentals of human perception. We know | how humans read. Typography is the practically application of | that knowledge. | | There was a brief period where coolness and aesthetic appeal on | the web trumped good typography principles (e.g., again, the | Arctic Adventure site). Most of that has settled down, though, | and most sites have reverted to simple and common standards. | SavantIdiot wrote: | I think it that the entire web (excluding videos) is nothing | but typography. Typography is not just about fancy flourishes | and font serifs, it is about readability and how information is | organized and presented visually. Granted, it does have a | stylistic element (which is like adding chance to a board | game), in that nothing is "perfect" because of culture and | trends, but there are rules developed over the past four | centuries that help make the medium more accessible. | [deleted] | indymike wrote: | Choice of colors makes it very difficult to read, even on a 4k | display. | SavantIdiot wrote: | Really? I don't like the subtle skeuomorph of trying to make it | look like a book, but the colors seem benign. What problem are | you seeing? | hyperstar wrote: | Are there any web sites that have beautiful typography? | xattt wrote: | I cringe a bit when I hear "beautiful typography". Usually, | this means style over substance. It is way easier to shave yaks | about the way something looks (and feel productive doing it), | than it is being concerned over the last 10% that takes content | from good enough to great. | theshadowknows wrote: | I cringe whenever people describe their app as "beautiful." | For the same reason. | wffurr wrote: | https://practicaltypography.com/ is pretty great. | mrob wrote: | https://bestmotherfucking.website/ | qart wrote: | Without a doubt. Fast, clean, adaptable. What's not to like? | Semaphor wrote: | #fff on #000. I find the site pretty exhausting to read. | Like most "motherfucking websites", a bad example for a | good site. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | Your monitor / browser is misconfigured. | | On some machines, maximum contrast is exhausting; on | others, reduced contrast is near-invisible. The | "exhausting" machines can be configured to reduce | contrast, but the "invisible" machines cannot trivially | be configured to increase contrast. | deltron3030 wrote: | The Marvin Visions site is cool: | https://www.readvisions.com/marvin | renarl wrote: | Are there any markdown themes that follow these guidelines? | uxcolumbo wrote: | The web is not print and that site looks unusable to me (it might | be old). | | It kinda looks broken on a big screen and it took me a while to | figure out what to do next. Call to actions were not clear. | | Keep things simple, the web is fluid and make sure your text is | legible and ensure good contrast. Also think about load | performance and ideally stick to fonts that are generally already | installed on devices by default. | | Or follow this handy guide: | | https://betterwebtype.com/articles/2021/06/07/all-you-need-i... | | https://betterwebtype.com/ (free web typography course) | lazyjeff wrote: | I teach user interface design, with a bit about typography but | I'm not a typographer myself. But I feel like a lot of the advice | there is taken from graphic design (based on the original EoTS | book), and not that practical for web designers where text is | slightly more fluid. | | Namely, much of the book is about making choices that depend on | the exact placement of individual characters on the screen. Like | the entire section about hyphenation. This doesn't make sense if | the glyphs show up slightly different on different screens. Like | Mac/PC/Android might render the same glyph for a font just a | pixel different (maybe even just due to the way it rounds a | number), bumping a glyph on to the next line. It's really hard to | control the exact placement of each glyph, and not worth fretting | about for the web. So I think the principles in the book that are | focused on exact placement of individual glyphs (characters) is | incompatible with the more general principles of responsive | layouts or using a native font stack. | | Some of the advice is automatically taken care of by defaults on | the browser/OS, like kerning or letterspacing are often not that | relevant to the web designer. It might be relevant to the people | working on rendering at the browser level. And the other advice | is stylistic and depends on the content (like indentation and | casing). | | I think the most practical advice from this book is fairly | straightforward: choose some appropriate sizings for various | headers and body text, check that you have about 70 characters | per line, and choose a comfortable line-height for the body text. | gozzoo wrote: | Can you recomend some good books or online courses teaching UI | and graphical design? | renarl wrote: | Refactoring UI book has been helpful to me as a dev who wants | to get something decent looking on the screen. | | https://www.refactoringui.com/book | tl wrote: | I like Adam Withan's free components (Tailwind), but his | paid content is problematic. From the your link the left | example is both clearer and more compact then the right | version that is a supposed "improvement". | SavantIdiot wrote: | "HTML and CSS 2 do not have any provision for automatic | hyphenation and current Web browsers support, even for manual | hyphenation, is poor. | | So don't justify text on the web." | | I've been waiting for this to be fixed since 1997. I suspect it | is a very difficult problem to get right. My Kindle accidentally | hyphenates things like "Walde-r" and "Lannister-s" (yes, I'm | reading GoT again). | kuished wrote: | I think it's already possible to get some of the way there on | the web today (having fine-grained control and avoiding | Walde-r's). Check out Hypher | (https://github.com/bramstein/hypher). If you're using Gatsby | and Markdown, I wrote a small plugin to be able to use it | there: | | https://www.gatsbyjs.com/plugins/gatsby-remark-hypher/ | | and | | https://github.com/siawyoung/remark-hypher | | (An example of how it looks like: https://siawyoung.com) | john-doe wrote: | Incidentally, by the same author, the state of hyphenation on | the web: http://clagnut.com/blog/2395 | | It's from 2019, but nothing much has changed since. My biggest | gripe is that browsers should prevent hyphenation when a word | starts with an uppercase letter, which doesn't seem too hard? | | The only bulletproof (but more complicated) solution is to | process text beforehand and insert soft hyphens (­) where | appropriate. | red_trumpet wrote: | There is the `hyphens` CSS property [1]. Apparently, all big | browsers implement it at least for english. It's a pity though, | that this is not possible for other languages (at least for | Chrome). It should be as simple as provide a basic dictionary | with hyphenation data... | | [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens | Semaphor wrote: | Cool, it seems that Firefox and Safari support quite some | languages on both Desktop and Mobile, but Chrome is English | only :/ | KaiserPro wrote: | I am surprised that they chose a font that's designed by used on | cheap shitty paper. The whole point of the web is that you didnt | need to use a font thats designed to overcome crap ink and crap | paper. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-04 23:00 UTC)