When you think of heraldry what comes to mind is probably knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, that sort of thing. Medieval stuff. But I prefer to think of it as one of the earliest design systems.
This totally checks out.
This is such a clever use of variable fonts!
We can use a lighter font weight to make the text easier to read whenever dark mode is active.
B612 is an highly legible open source font family designed and tested to be used on aircraft cockpit screens.
A deep dive info focus styles with this conclusion:
The default focus ring works. There are problems with it, but it can be good enough, especially if you can’t dedicate time and energy to create a custom focus ring.
Some excellent explanations for these five pieces of sensible typography advice:
- Set your base font size in relative units
- Check the colour of your type and only then its contrast
- Use highly legible fonts
- Shape your paragraphs well
- Correctly use the heading levels
I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times.
I saw Frank give this talk at Mirror Conf last year and it resonated with me so so much. I’ve been looking forward to him publishing the transcript ever since. If you’re anything like me, this will read as though it’s coming from directly inside your head.
In one way, it is easier to be inexperienced: you don’t have to learn what is no longer relevant. Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago.
I could just keep quoting the whole thing, because it’s all brilliant, but I’ll stop with one more bit about the increasing complexity of build processes and the decreasing availability of a simple view source:
Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to have). And the best way to help someone write markup is to make sure they can read markup.
A fascinating piece by Eleanor on the typographic tweaking that the Wellcome team did to balance the competing needs of different users.
There you are reading an article when suddenly it’s interrupted by a big piece of text that’s repeating something you just read in the previous paragraph. Or it’s interrupted by a big piece of text that’s spoiling a sentence that you are about to read in subsequent paragraphs.
There you are reading an article when suddenly it’s interrupted by a big piece of text that’s repeating something you just read in the previous paragraph.
To be honest, I find pull quotes pretty annoying in printed magazines too, but I can at least see the justification for them there: if you’re flipping through a magazine, they act as eye-catching inducements to stop and read (in much the same way that good photography does or illustration does). But once you’re actually reading an article, they’re incredibly frustrating.
You either end up learning to blot them out completely, or you end up reading the same sentence twice.
You either end up learning to blot them out completely, or you end up reading the same sentence twice. Blotting them out is easier said than done on a small-screen device. At least on a large screen, pull quotes can be shunted off to the side, but on handheld devices, pull quotes really make no sense at all.
Are pull quotes online an example of a skeuomorph? “An object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artefact made from another material.”
I think they might simply be an example of unexamined assumptions. The default assumption is that pull quotes on the web are fine, because everyone else is doing pull quotes on the web. But has anybody ever stopped to ask why? It was this same spiral of unexamined assumptions that led to the web drowning in a sea of splash pages in the early 2000s.
I think they might simply be an example of unexamined assumptions.
I’m genuinely curious to hear the design justification for pull quotes on the web (particularly on mobile), because as a reader, I can give plenty of reasons for their removal.
A handy tool for testing the legibility of different typefaces under all sorts of conditions.
The history and physiology of text on screen. You can also see the slides from the talk that prompted this article.
Vasilis examines the multitude of factors that could influence an ideal measure.
Some handy tips for starting off your responsive designs from the type out.
This handy matrix shows the effect of different -webkit-font-smoothing setting on various text combinations (serif/san-serif light/dark, etc.).
An examination into the legibility of labels on online mapping services.
A forthcoming typeface designed specifically to help people with dyslexia read and write more effectively.
Erik Spiekermann expounding on the beauty – and the difficulty – of designing numbers.
Andy Hume has written a superb article about typography on the Web.
