80% science, 20% art
Browser support for typography is a bothersome process and the cause of much debate, head scratching and occasional out bursts of frustration. So when we heard that the legend Jon Tan of Omni TI and local user experience super brain Richard Rutter were doing a Skillswap talk on typography, we made sure our bums were firmly pressed into a seat in front of them, heck we even took notes.
I can here some of you muttering ‘bothered’. Well stop for a minute and consider you read loads online everyday and when its good, it’s so god damn good you don’t even consider the great typography do you? Except for us type junkies, who book mark nice typography. But when it sucks and it’s a struggle it’s a crap and can lead to users getting really rather pissed off and of course we don’t want that do we?
Typography or rather typesetting has been around for ages - yes before I started to turn grey. Another serious misconception, is the association that when we talk about gorgeous and well crafted letters or glyphs, its exclusively print that we’re waxing lyrical about. No it’s not, and this is the bit that really makes me get gooey; it doesn’t have to look crap any more.
Well, ok big statement that. Yes, we’re still restricted to web standard fonts, however browser support for the typographical aspect of CSS is evolving and we’re no longer bound to just bold! Yep we can do italic too now and no I don’t mean just making some poor unsuspecting font, forced to go all oblique (a crime worthy of death, or as our junior discovered buying the studio beer all night). We can sort out widows, orphans and make forced justified look great too.
Of course, there was plenty of talk of font embedding and all the commercial, licence and ethical nightmares it will create. To be honest we’re sitting on the fence, we’re not super uber nerds so our insight is limited, but we can’t wait for the dust settle and start font embedding our sites.
And do you know the best bit of all? All of this power requires some genuine typographic understanding to really make it work. Personally, it excited me to hear some major user experience geeks talking about grids, ratios, ligatures, median heights and the baseline! Lovely they could almost be designers, hell they are designers just talking the 80% science and 20% art rules from the left, where as I’ve always come at it from the right.
Tags: Interesting, Skillswap, Typography