You are spot on with this article. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more over the last few months.
There are many books and articles on typography, but considerably few explore typeface selection and pairing.
You say there are ‘considerably few’ – but which are those few? I’d be interested to know. I have a few books on type but none of them seem to go into this subject with much (or any) depth.
Perhaps there is a gap in the web for an online directory or cookbook of successful type pairings. I realise that the choice depends on the design context, but it still might be of some use.
H’mmmm. I’m not entirely convinced that this is a good idea, y’know. Often the only way to make people follow best practice is to point out technical limitations in their ideas – for example, “You can’t use sIFR for all your text because it will take 20 minutes to load the page”.
Once Dreamweaver and other visual tools take on @font-face we’re doomed, because every idiot who thinks owning a copy of Dreamweaver makes them a designer will start littering the web with badly-set type.
Just wanted to make a quick comment about web fonts. Has anyone tried Extensis WebINK? It seems pretty cool and inexpensive solution for fancy web fonts.
26 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleKinedo
I;m always looking for ways to perk things up. Does using sifr with typography make it not be seo friendly anyone?
Jason Santa Maria
Nope, sIFR just replaces normal text on the page, which is still perfectly readable to search engines.
thesheep
You are spot on with this article. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more over the last few months.
You say there are ‘considerably few’ – but which are those few? I’d be interested to know. I have a few books on type but none of them seem to go into this subject with much (or any) depth.
Perhaps there is a gap in the web for an online directory or cookbook of successful type pairings. I realise that the choice depends on the design context, but it still might be of some use.
Chris Cox
H’mmmm. I’m not entirely convinced that this is a good idea, y’know. Often the only way to make people follow best practice is to point out technical limitations in their ideas – for example, “You can’t use sIFR for all your text because it will take 20 minutes to load the page”.
Once Dreamweaver and other visual tools take on @font-face we’re doomed, because every idiot who thinks owning a copy of Dreamweaver makes them a designer will start littering the web with badly-set type.
cal1977
Great article, the cross browser issue is always going to be a nightmare.
maybraydigital
Just wanted to make a quick comment about web fonts. Has anyone tried Extensis WebINK? It seems pretty cool and inexpensive solution for fancy web fonts.