Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

My contention is that not only web-designers, but everyone who uses a word processor should get at least baseline training in typography and layout. It should be a short high-school course. The basic rules are not that hard.<p>It&#x27;s possible to make decent looking documents in Microsoft Word &#x2F; Libre Office &#x2F; Abiword &#x2F; whatever, but people with no idea what they&#x27;re doing (and no idea that they have no idea what they&#x27;re doing) easily create monstrous abominations that communicate nothing beyond &quot;unprofessional&quot; and scream &quot;I have the aesthetic taste of a 3 year old&quot;.

I admire all the work the typographers do to make amazing-looking websites, and yet I prefer to read sites (like mathpages, or Dan Luu&#x27;s site) which have next to no styling. They&#x27;re just easier for me to read. I&#x27;m definitely not hating, but I feel like it&#x27;s good to keep in mind where the point of diminishing returns is.

Seeing the title, I suspected that the typography will be messed up. And indeed, instead of my preferred configured font size, it is overly large and set in pixels, the line heights are higher than I would prefer as well (the font I use, Noto Sans, already has a pretty high leading). The situation with colors and margins is similar, to accompany that.<p>And the reason I guessed it to be that way is because it is like that much of the time: once people focus on something that is not broken too badly, more often they mess it up, rather than improve. I think a much better advice would be just to not touch it. Maybe go roll your own crypto if you feel creative, but stop messing up fonts, colors, and the rest of interfaces: plain HTML is good and sufficient for most web publishing.<p>Edit: though learning about typography still should not harm. Just applying it poorly--as done most of the time--may be annoying. Also same as with colors and adjacent design subjects.

This site, and many other typography-adjacent sites, have <i>comically</i> large text on my desktop computer. What&#x27;s up with that?<p>(Maybe I&#x27;ve just misconfigured my browser.)

(2006)<p>In case you, like me, miss the dateline at the top and become more and more puzzled by the arguments and examples presented.<p>I will credit the article for using examples that are still visually appealing today, even (especially?) the 2004 blog.

It is a bit ironic that the website has white text on black background which is no-no on screens as the very high contrast creates ghosting and eye strain &#x2F; hurt for many people. Carefully read the text, then look at anywhere else and you&#x27;ll see ghost lines everywhere for a few minutes. So the text should at least be gray-ish to decrease the contrast if you want to go that way. This works pretty well on paper, but sucks on screen.<p>Whenever I see such content, I send them this link which demonstrates the issue in a fun way: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ironicsans.com&#x2F;owmyeyes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ironicsans.com&#x2F;owmyeyes&#x2F;</a>

Typography should be left to the user agent and user style sheet.<p>Attempts to make sites &quot;pixel perfect&quot; is the worst habit from the print-world that designers brought online with them.

I have trouble caring about what someone says about typography when they&#x27;ve chosen abnormally excessive letterspacing which makes reading awkward and effortful.

Good oppty to share <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;every-layout.dev&#x2F;rudiments&#x2F;axioms" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;every-layout.dev&#x2F;rudiments&#x2F;axioms</a> and its use of a coherent typographic scale as the basis of fundamentally sound web UI layout.

(2006) An article about the importance of typography uses massive, unreadable font at 25px.

Not anymore, maybe back when static sites were common. Web sites now are applications with lots of interactivity. The interactive design is often lost because designers are mostly designing for static layouts, with interactivity falling lower in priority. This then becomes a bad experience with developers having to constantly fix interactivity issues that were born from lack of design and product specs.

The most typographical thing is stability. Look at a book. It is visually stable. The text is where the printer has put it and does not move. You can find quotes if you roughly remember where on the page they were.<p>Now look at a typical web page. It is scrolled! Nothing is stable. On every move everything changes. There is not a single visually fixed anchor aside from the browser window itself, which is unhelpful anyway. (E.g. with all that talk about semantic HTML it could maybe give us a standard table of contents, but does it?) With such a drastic departure from the essence of typography some fancy hanging punctuation won&#x27;t help. Of course, once the main things are in place, it would be nice to have typographical niceties as well.

To those god wishes to punish, he first teaches typography.

As true then as it is now. It&#x27;s rare, even with highly interactive applications, that text isn&#x27;t a fundamental component of your website or application.

Can anyone recommend a good course in typography?

I bought The Elements of Typographic Style over 20 years ago. I got about an hour in and never picked it up again. It isn&#x27;t that the book is bad but typography isn&#x27;t a topic that I want to self study. I think I could enjoy the topic in a classroom or study group setting but my mind just wonders to other things sitting in a chair reading about it.

Font selection should be left up to the browser vendor, and ultimately, the user, and not be overwritten or otherwise dictated by the website.

I read this article in 2006. Back then, it was set in the Georgia typeface at 16px font size. It looked great.<p>Now it&#x27;s 32px and a custom font with some ornamentation.<p>For me the text appears to big to read without zooming out and the typeface looks medieval. If the purpose of typography is to &quot;honour the content&quot; (cf. Bringhurst), this does not seem to be a good example.