Link tags: typesetting

Web Typography News #43: Typesetting Moby-Dick, part 2

Great typography on the web should be designed in layers. The web is an imperfect medium, consumed by countless different devices over untold numbers of network connections—each with their own capabilities, limitations, and peculiarities. To think that you can create one solution that will look and work the same everywhere is a fantasy. To make this more than just one nice book website, the whole project and process needs to embrace this reality.

Rise of the Digital Fonts

A history of typesetting from movable type to variable fonts.

Point, don’t point — I love Typography

A brief history of the manicule, illustrated with some extreme examples.

A short history of body copy sizes on the Web

A look at the trend towards larger and larger font sizes for body copy on the web, culminating with Resilient Web Design.

There are some good arguments here for the upper limit on the font size there being too high, so I’ve adjusted it slightly. Now on large screens, the body copy on Resilient Web Design is 32px (2 times 1em), down from 40px (2.5 times 1em).

Type in the digital era is a mess

Marcin explains why line height works differently in print and the web. Along the way, he hits upon this key insight about CSS:

Web also took away some of the control from typesetters. What in the print era were absolute rules, now became suggestions.

Remember that every line of CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser.

All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Everything you need to know about hyphenation on the web today, from Rich’s galaxy brain.

Hyphenation is a perfect example of progressive enhancement, so you can start applying the above now if you think your readers will benefit from it – support among browsers will only increase.

The Complete CSS Demo for OpenType Features - OpenType Features in CSS

Every single font-feature-settings value demonstrated in one single page.

Tim Brown: Coming soon: Flexible Typesetting

Fellow web type nerds: Tim Brown brings very good tidings indeed!

My new book is called Flexible Typesetting, and it will be published by A Book Apart this summer. I absolutely cannot wait for you to read it, because we have so much to talk about.

V6: Typography and Proportions | Rob Weychert

Rob walks us through the typographic choices for his recent redesign:

Most of what I design that incorporates type has a typographic scale as its foundation, which informs the typeface choices and layout proportions. The process of creating that scale begins by asking what the type needs to do, and what role contrasting sizes will play in that.

Web Typography: Designing Tables to be Read, Not Looked At · An A List Apart Article

An extract from Richard’s excellent book, this is a deep dive into styling tables for the web (featuring some CSS I had never even heard of).

Tables can be beautiful but they are not works of art. Instead of painting and decorating them, design tables for your reader.

(It also contains a splendid use of the term “crawl bar.”)

The Equilateral Triangle of a Perfect Paragraph | Better Web Type

This is a fun game (I scored a measly 73/100). The idea is to develop a feeling for the balance between font-size, line-height, and line length …just like the three sides of an equilateral triangle.

Too many of them still set line-height, font size and line width as independent features when in fact they should all be considered together. The equilateral triangle is a perfect representation of how the three features work in harmony.

The last day of hot metal press before computers come in at The New York Times | Aeon Videos

The 1978 short film Farewell, etaoin shrdlu documents the changeover from linotype to digital typesetting at The New York Times.

An evenhanded treatment of the unremitting march of technological progress, Weiss’s film about an outmoded craft is stylistically vintage yet also immediate in its investigation of modernity.

Explorations in Typography / Mastering the Art of Fine Typesetting

What a great way to sell a book with “explorations” in the title—play around with the font size, leading, alignment (and browser window size).