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The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing. Advertisement As printed typography enjoys the fruits of high-DPI glory, proudly displaying its beautiful curves and subtleties, its on-screen counterpart remains stifled by bulky pixels, living in a world of jagged edges, distorted letterforms and trimmed serifs. Until display manufacturers produce affordable 200 or 300 PPI monitors, we’ll have to rely on software advances to fix these problems. Enter anti-aliasing: the next best thing to a world of higher-resolution monitors. The concept of anti-aliasing is fairly simple: add semi-transparent pixels along the edges of letterforms to smooth the appearance of the “stair-step” effect. However, many factors and technologies determine the actual effectiveness of the process: hinting, subpixel rendering, software capabilities and operating system specifications, to name a few.

Technologies Aliased vs. It takes only a quick glance to realize that anti-aliasing is extremely important to making text legible. Font Hinting Subpixel Rendering Input. The Optimal Line Length Principle Applied to Web Design. Jun 16, 2009; Category: CSS, Design/Development; Tags: CSS, Design/Development; 6 Comments The other day I pointed out some of the differences between web design and print design. It started me thinking about some of the things I learned as a print designer that are also applicable to web design. One of the most useful is the Principle of Optimal Line Length. It states that, for any given font-size of a multiple-line block of type (like a paragraph), there is a range of line lengths and line-heights that most people consider easily readable.

Those 3 attributes—font-size, line-height, line length—are inter-related.* Change one, and you may need to change at least one of the others for most people to consider the text readable. In simple terms it means that, the wider the line length, the greater the line-height must be. Or, the bigger the font, the wider the line length. Below is an illustration meant to demonstrate the relationships between the 3 attributes. Px - em - % - pt - keyword. Keyword Valid options for setting font-size in keyword are xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, and xx-large as well as relative keywords smaller and larger.

Surprisingly enough, keyword sizing is pretty consistent across browsers and platforms. See below a test page in Opera, Firefox, IE 6, and Safari: Note that although the they are pretty close, there are differences in where the lines break and total paragraph height. Only when one of the relative sizing keywords are used does the "cascade" kick in and the font-size of the parent element effects the child. Keywords are a perfectly fine way to size fonts on the web. However, keywords don't offer very fine-grained control of your typography, as the choices are fairly limited. px If you need fine-grained control, sizing fonts in pixel values (px) is an excellent choice (it's my favorite). Windows, Mac, aliased, anti-aliased, cross-browsers, doesn't matter, a font set at 14px will be 14px tall. Em The first one is the big one.

Pt. Cufón - fonts for the people. 10 Principles For Readable Web Typography. Advertisement by Matt Cronin Readability is one of the more important aspects of Web design usability. Readable text affects how users process the information in the content. Poor readability scares readers away from the content. On the other hand, done correctly, readability allows users to efficiently read and take in the information in the text. You want users to be able to read your content and absorb it easily. In this post, we’ll explain some Web typography terms and how they play into readability; we’ll present numerous tips to help improve the readability of your content; and we’ll showcase very readable websites, layouts and articles.

You may also be interested in the following related posts: The Terms, And What Each Means For Readability There are many factors that play into the readability of text. Hierarchy Every typographic layout needs the essential element of hierarchy. UXBooth5 uses a very clean hierarchy to achieve readable Web typography. The Keys to Readable Typography 1. The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. CSS Typography Reference Sheet. Common fonts to all versions of Windows & Mac equivalents. Last updated: 2008/06/03 Return to the main page Introduction Here you can find the list with the standard set of fonts common to all versions of Windows and their Mac substitutes, referred sometimes as "browser safe fonts". This is the reference I use when making web pages and I expect you will find it useful too. If you are new to web design, maybe you are thinking: "Why I have to limit to that small set of fonts?

I have a large collection of nice fonts in my computer". Well, as seasoned web designers already know, browsers can use only the fonts installed in each computer, so it means that every visitor of your web page needs to have all the fonts you want to use installed in his/her computer. If you want to know how the fonts are displayed in other OS's or browsers than yours, after the table you can find several screen shots of this page in different systems and browsers. The list First, a few introductory notes: The names in grey are the generic family of each font.

sIFR Generator. sIFR lite. "It auto-detects the text color of elements! " nce upon a time some really good web developers created sIFR. Their goal was to seamlessly convert HTML headlines into nice fonts. Well, these developers did a great job getting it to work nicely. Looking at their code, I decided I would create a "lite" version of sIFR using a more object-oriented approach. sIFR Lite is a bit easier to read, and more intuitive to use.

The only drawbacks are that it is currently unproven on a large scale in the real world. This library is of course open-source, so I welcome you to submit any improvements, suggestions, or bug reports using my contact form. Tested in current versions of Safari, FireFox, FireFox Mac, Camino, IE, and Opera How is this different than the original sIFR? It is smaller. Just Give Me The Code! If you want to dive right in and figure it out for yourself, you can download sIFR Lite right now! Basic Usage Creating a new font Applying a font to its default target elements gothic.replace() Facelift Image Replacement. 50 Useful Design Tools For Web Typography. Advertisement Typography is elegant when it is attractive and communicates the designer’s ideas. When chosen wisely and used carefully, it can be very effective in supporting the overall design. Designers are always exploring different techniques with type: some use images or sIFR to produce very beautiful typography, while others prefer CSS alone to get the typography just right.

Today, we will look at 50 most useful typographic tools, techniques and resources for creating effective and expressive designs. We will also look at some hands-on typography tools that help designers and developers learn how to style their Web content, test it interactively and see the changes instantly. These tools are great for experimenting with different font types for your website. Please feel free to suggest further tools and resources in the comments to this post. And follow us on Twitter You may want to take a look at the following related articles: 1. Default Mac OS X 10.4 fonts list (via Elementiks) 2. Typeface.js. Typographic Contrast and Flow. As you have probably know, most online readers don't read line by line, instead they scan (from one point to another). For this reason, designers create typographic contrast and flow by emphasizing certain text. Contrast is important because not all the content within a page have the same value, some have greater significance than the others.

By creating contrast, you can direct the reader's attention to the important messages and at the same time enhance the visual appearance. Here are seven basic methods on how you can create typographic contrast. 1. Size Larger font size indicate higher priority because it draws reader's attention, therefore this method is commonly applied on headings. On the other hand, you can de-emphasize by using smaller font size. 2. Contrast can be achieved by mixing different typeface classifications. Generally, to create a contrast between the headings and the body text, we use serif font for the headings and sans-serif font for the body, or vice versa. 3. 4. 5. 8 Definitive Web Font Stacks [Design Tips & Tricks] “Web design is 95% typography.” – Oliver Reichenstein “Typography is not ‘picking a cool font.’” – Jeff Croft “Typography is … about shaping text for optimal reading experience.” – Oliver Reichenstein Over the last few months, I’ve spent more time than I intended on exploring the whole idea of fonts and typography for the Web.

(My friend, typography expert Simon Pascal Klein, writes, “The former is a stylized set of glyphs of characters,” while “the other [is] the whole art of creating type and setting it into the written word.” In the process, I’ve been considering the idea of font stacks – using the well-known font-family CSS property – to list as many different fonts as possible in order to optimize the web site experience for a maximum number of users. What About User Preferences? There’s a strong argument for leaving well enough alone, and simply specifying serif or sans serif fonts, thus letting the user’s own settings determine the font display.

Different Categories of Fonts.