Web Typography: Educational Resources, Tools and Techniques. Web Design is 95% Typography. By Oliver Reichenstein 95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography. Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites: Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today.
It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him. With some imagination (replace print with online) this sounds like the job description of an information designer. Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. Books. Building Books with CSS3. While historically, it’s been difficult at best to create print-quality PDF books from markup alone, CSS3 now brings the Paged Media Module, which targets print book formatting.
“Paged” media exists as finite pages, like books and magazines, rather than as long scrolling stretches of text, like most websites. CSS3 allows us to style text, divide it into book pages, and set the page structure as a whole. You can dictate the size of the book, header and footer content, how to display cross references and tables of contents, whether to add guides and bleeds for commercial printing companies, and more. With a single CSS stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an ePub file.
It’s a lightweight and adaptable workflow, which gets you beautiful books faster. XML, XSL, XHTML, and PDF processors#section1 Article Continues Below. A List Apart: Topics: Design: Typography. Table of Contents. Five simple steps to better typography. – April 13th, 2005 – Typography, I find, is still a bit of mystery to a lot of designers.
The kind of typography I’m talking about is not your typical “What font should I use” typography but rather your “knowing your hanging punctuation from your em-dash” typography. Call me a little bit purist but this bothers me. So, in an attempt to spread the word here’s the first of five simple steps to better typography. To kick it off, part one is about the Measure.
Measure the Measure. The Measure is the name given to the width of a body of type. One point = 1/72 of an inchOne pica = 12 pointsOne em = The distance horizontally equal to the type size, in points, you are using. But, with the advent of DTP packages and the website design the following are also now used: MillimetresPixels There is an optimum width for a Measure and that is defined by the amount of characters are in the line. CSS and fluid? What is interesting here is fluid designs on the web. The Measure and leading. Reversing out? Tracking.