Posts about Typography

The Carsonified roadies have loaded their white Transit and braved the ferry across the sea to Northern Ireland. This week I’m joining the Future Of Web Design Tour in Belfast, presenting “How to Design in the Browser”. More on that later. But first, a one-hour workshop, “Extreme Makeover, Typography Edition”

Typotheque is an independent type foundry based in the Netherlands who offer fonts for PC and Macintosh. They have kindly invited me into the beta program of their new @font-face embedding service.

This morning my inbox popped with an invitation to the preview of Typekit, a technology platform that hosts both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM. Back in May I wrote that Typekit will change everything, here are my first impressions of Typekit in action at For A Beautiful Web.

Joe Drew, one of the people on Mozilla’s graphics team has responded to my comment on First Impressions on Typekit; Studying type rendering closely also calls into question the natural differences between the ways that browsers render type as I discussed in Walls Come Tumbling Down. Safari’s text rendering is clearly more refined and superior to Firefox 3.5.

Well, perhaps not quite everything. Today Jeffrey Veen let the cat out of the proverbial. He announced Typekit.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the limitations of current CSS to bind font styling to the availability of typefaces. I mused that a clever person might develop a solution using Javascript.

The baseline is an invisible line onto which all type characters sit, although of course some characters (including ‘j’, ‘p’, ‘g’ and ‘y’) have descenders that hang below the baseline. Baseline shift involves moving characters up or down in relation to the baseline and using it effectively can make a huge difference to the professional look of your type. Although baseline shift has traditionally been a part of using tools like InDesign or Quark, there are ways to accomplish the same results using today’s CSS.

As I wrote yesterday, CSS has unresolved problems concerning the lack of variable line-heights (leading) in relation to available installed typefaces. I don’t expect those to be resolved any time soon, unless by switching to @font-face for even commonly installed typefaces or some clever JavaScript font detection. During my teaching in Australia last week, another leading issue, in relation to CSS frameworks, came to mind. This one can be resolved by applying a little typography knowledge.

Would you be surprised if you heard me grumble about CSS3 and web typography *?

Judging from the response from the people who attended, our first Visual Web Design Masterclass in London this month was a huge success. As a large part of the day was spent learning about typography, both relating to type and to layouts devised from typographic principles, I chose to illustrate the lessons by typesetting The Waste Land, a poem by TS. Eliot. If you weren't able to attend, now is your chance to take a look at the results of my experiments.