<i>Bullet points, should ideally be in the page margin. Not indented.</i><p>Really? To me that's "ugly", as in "that's not how it looks anywhere, so it jumps out at me". The reason given in the linked text seems to be a design one ("it looks ugly") and not something to do with usability (which is a major goal of typography).
Please don’t use underlines as emphasis on the web. That’s just confusing. Underlines should be used for links, nothing else. I think that should be self-evident but some people still get it wrong. Clicking on underlined words – expecting further explanation or additional material – with nothing happening always makes me sad :)<p>(As an aside, I personally don’t like underlines even in print. I much prefer the subtle use of italics. But that’s very much a question of taste.)
<i>Kerning is the spacing between letters. Again, like leading this seems like an obvious one, but still needs careful attention. Consider if your typeface generally needs spacing out more, or if it looks better with tighter kerning.</i><p>It sounds to me like the author might actually be talking about <i>tracking</i>, rather than kerning. From wikipedia: "While tracking increases the space between characters evenly, regardless of the characters, kerning increases the space based on character pairs".
Fully-justified text can actually be more readable than ragged-right (although ragged-right is definitely better for some contexts like narrow lines, and can apparently help readers with dyslexia). I believe this is because justified text makes it easier for the eye find the end of the next line and then track back to its start. Here's a reference to one study in which justified performed better than ragged-right (there are others too):<p><a href="http://eserver.org/courses/w01/tc510/hades/kaltenbach1.htm" rel="nofollow">http://eserver.org/courses/w01/tc510/hades/kaltenbach1.htm</a><p>The advice to use ragged-right is almost always correct on the web, where it's not generally possible to reliably hyphenate or manually typeset your pages. But in print I would use justified text more often than ragged-right. There are reasons that almost all books and newspapers are set justified.
I feel as if the trend in type size for body text is shifting towards larger text. I just see it happening all over the internet on websites I visit. A few years ago, 10-12 pt used to be the norm, but now I often see 14pt being used.
Maybe it's just me, but that blog doesn't look right unless the browser is > 1600px wide.<p>Anyone have a simple rules for good web design link handy?
Interesting that he suggests no more than three fonts; the rule when I was poking around was more like two, one for headlines (if you must) and then a good proper body font for almost everything.
Good post! When you think about it, most of these are brain-dead and so intuitive, that you'd think everyone follows them by default. Often, I see over-use of emphasis (italics, bold, or underlined) and abrupt font size changes without reason.
Seems like there is a contradiction. What set of font sizes meet the two constraints (3-4 different font sizes and size them according to the Fibonacci sequence / Golden Ratio) and look great on a web page?
The fibonacci sequence sounds good in theory but I can't imagine this actually looks nice in print. Or notably more 'natural' than using standard sizes, for that matter.