Typography Dilemmas

Typography Dilemmas

James O`Brien | 29/11/2006

One of the major limitations facing the modern web designer is typography. How do you ensure that your web type will even remotely reflect the initial design when users are viewing your work on different browsers with different functionality on a multitude of operating systems?

Even if cross browser compatibility wasn’t an issue there is the issue of choice, it seems that the hundreds if not thousands of fonts out there have been culled back to between five and ten for the web designer who has little fine control over things such as line spacing and kerning.

How is one to overcome these seemingly large obstacles in order to stand out amongst the plethora of bland on the web? Firstly, stray away from 12pt times new roman, experiment with various text sizing to create variance within your text. Relative sizes reign supreme, using ‘Em’ units – so called as 1em is equal to the width of a lowercase ‘m’ character, will result in better compatibility than specifying fixed point or pixel values.

Line spacing is another area in which the designer can create new effects to make a body of text stand out. Example, as you increase font size the size of the gap between letters also increases, with larger fonts try dialing in some negative spacing to put a new spin on a old font.

As with most things design though, the key is in being audacious without over stepping the mark. The aim with text is to create spunk without sacrificing readability, so be daring, experiment a little and before long completely flexible, fully supported CSS typography may become reality.

tags: Technology