Typography

Typography: The art of arrangemant, style, appearance and printing of type and typefaces.

This week we were looking at Typography and how it is an essential part within web design. We immediately found out that there are a numbar of problems for web typography. It has to work accros different computer platforms as well as screen sizes, the web designer must understand issues and address them, maintain some kind of control, line length, number of lines and font sizes. These are all things that need to be taken into consideration when creating a website.
           We were then given a list of typography designers, from this i chose to do some research on Paul Baker. While looking through his website, i came accross alot of the work that he does as well as awards that he's won and some of the high end clients that he has worked for, Yale University Press, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Caxton Club of Chicago to name a few. i also found a very useful section on Setting Type which gave an overview of typography including Letter Spacing, Word Spacing, Leading, Type Selection and Formatting I found this all very useless when i came to creating my five page website.

http://www.pbtweb.com/index.html here is the link to the website.

Going back to the Seminar we found out about different font styles and some the arew widely used across the web which would help us choose a font which would meet the criteria for different systems and screen sizes.

Serif Fonts: Serif's are non-structural detailson the ends of some of the strokesthat make up letters and symbols. Commonly available Serif fonts, Times New Roman and Georgia.

Sans-Serif Fonts: Simply a font that doesn't have serif's. Sans-serif fonts are more common for on screen text, particularly for headlines and sub-heads. Coomnly available Sans-Serif fonts, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma anf Trebuchet MS.

Font Size and Spacing

It used to be that font sizes were specified within the HTML markup of a web page. Now, XHTML requires “well formed” markup, so font sizes and line heights are specified within the CSS. In CSS, font sizes can be specified using a number of different measurement units. All of these units allow the user to change the font size in their browser settings, if they so wish. In addition, some of these units are designed to ‘scale’ the whole page (in practice, the width of the column containing the text) if the user changes the font size.

CSS Syntax         Measurement Unit
px                        pixels
pt                         points
pc                        picas
mm                      millimetres
cm                       centimetres
in                         inches
%                        percent
em                       a unit of measure that is relative to the width of the letter in that typeface                      
ex                        same principle as em, but based on the height of the lowercase letter in the given typeface

Some things to remember:
Don't mix too many fonts in a webpage.
Generally, two fonts and suffiecient in any design.
Don't forget you can use typeface variations (bold, italic, etc) for different content areas.
Try designing a page that use only one font for all text areas.
You can experiment with font colour and hierachy too.