What's up with these typophiles? They walk around thinking they're the most important member of the club.<p>The truth is, design is complicated because it is not (yet) a science. Typography is important, but it is not king. What we really need to do is get inside the user's head and model their thought process. This is probably impossible, so we should do the next best thing: learn empathy. Be the user. Not some one-trick pony.
I'm tired of people citing Khoi Vinh’s Web Site as <i>the best web design in the world</i> just because it's simple, typohraphical, monochromatic, and grid-based.<p>Face it people! if all the internet looked like this it will be <i>boooring</i>, not beautiful. It's part of subtraction's aesthetic and hardly works anywhere else.<p>I love Khoi's site, but I simply can't stand any other that uses his theme (<a href="http://basicmaths.subtraction.com/" rel="nofollow">http://basicmaths.subtraction.com/</a>) because they look so dull, impersonal and pretentious.<p>Where's the David Carson of this generation?
Web design is 95% Typography to typophiles, 95% graphic design to graphic designers, 95% usability to UX experts. In short, people look at and notice what they are interested in, but to the average punter each of these things makes a much smaller contribution.
The context of this statement is important, I think. Back in 2006 web sites were all about Flash, widgets, fancy graphics etc. All Oliver was saying is that these things are unimportant if your text is unreadable.<p>And by typography he means a lot more than whether it's georgia or helvetica.
Web design (and I'm saying that as the owner of one of the worst designed sites in the world) is compromise.<p>Design, form and function compete for limited space and try to advance towards that goal by picking the perfect mix between conflicting goals. It should look good, it should work and what text you've got should be readable.<p>But not all websites center around the written word, and user experience is not just reading text on a website.<p>Hint: Less text is better. So good Web Design is to avoid having the problem that 95% of your web design centers around typography or any other single metric.<p>It's the total package that matters and typography is but one (minor) element in there. If it isn't <i>just</i> the right font but it is readable you're already 90% there, the remaining 5% may or may not be important to you.<p>I know great sites that use 'courier' or some other minimalist approach and I know sites that suck that have been designed by the best in the industry, they look great but they're like super nice wrapping on a shitty present.<p>Strike the right balance, don't worry too much about any one factor, especially not typography. After all, the screens we have are direct descendants from the 8x6 dot matrix fonts of not that long ago, the availability of information is what drove this industry, not the availability of high resolution display for typographical purposes.<p>We don't call them graphics displays for nothing, pictures <i>still</i> paint a thousand words.
The followup (Part 2) is here:
<a href="http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/webdesign-is-95-typography-partii" rel="nofollow">http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/webdesign-is-95-typog...</a>
I think one should extend the scope of classic typography slightly to understand where the author is coming from.
To me it makes perfect sense. If you can't structure your text right to get the message across, then fancy designs and widgets won't help you either.
I have to admit that this page looks very good, unlike many other articles that claim to know the secret to web design. It would be even better if it weren't right centered.
People can bang on about typography all they like, but any browser that won't let me override the designer's choice of fonts with ones that actually render nicely on my display won't get used.<p>(I'm looking at you Chrome)<p>Over here, font fanaticism is (sensibly) restricted to images.<p>How can a web designer have any idea what will look nice on a display with completely different visual characteristics to his own? Especially if the OS has a completely different font rendering library to boot.
Web design to meet the users' needs might be as much as 50 percent information architecture. When I go to most websites, I'm looking for information, not eye candy.