Web Typography
One thing that I am sure I need to research and study more is web typography (or simply typography in general). I know that is one of the areas I am weaker in as a designer. Well, to be more correct I am weak in design in general. That being said, good typography can more than make up for a more simplistic design and still look great.
I have always loved the information that I get from alistapart.com, and they also use great typography on their site. I started my search there and came across a good article called On Web Typography. The author discusses many of the perks, and downfalls, of implementing the @font-face CSS property. He then goes on to impart at least a few ground rules, or suggestions, on how to succeed with the increasing options being introduced to web typography. Unfortunately the discussion was already closed for this article as there was some great discussion already.
Next I read a post called More Meaningful Typography which deals less with choosing the right type face, and more with font sizing, line-height, and line length based on a modular scale (in this case the golden ratio, 1.618). This article was extremely helpful to me, and it even links to the writers web application which will give you the sizes in the scale once you pick a starting number. He also mentioned a CSS property that I have never even heard of.
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
This apparently enables a font’s native kerning instructions. Basically making the font render the way the type designer designed it. He mentions a possibility of performance drawbacks but says he has found them to be negligible. I was able to comment on this blog article.
Finally, I wanted to go back and read up on the history of how the @font-face and this new web typography started so I read an article called Web Fonts At The Crossing. This article gives a good backstory on the implementation of this tool from the original W3C specs on to Google’s font hosting tools. This article is great if you wanna first jump in to what web fonts means today. I was able to comment on this blog article.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/on-web-typography/
