Author
Tim Brown
Tim Brown is a designer, writer, speaker, and toolmaker, with a focus on typography. Formerly a web designer at Vassar College, he is now Type Manager for Adobe Typekit and the author of Nice Web Type. Tim made Modular Scale and Web Font Specimen, inspired Molten Leading, and talks about Universal Typography. He lives and works in New York State’s beautiful Hudson Valley with his wife and college sweetheart, Eileen, their two daughters, and two dogs.
Also from this author
The work of a web typographer—that’s you—is challenging to say the least. Between highly variable screen sizes (and thereby line lengths), font size variability, and even font availability, it’s difficult to design great reading experiences. Tim Brown’s Flexible Typesetting is here to help.
Progressive enhancement is part of typography now. First, style text in a generic way. Then, if the fonts you intend are active, follow up with rules that depend on the presence (and dimensions) of those fonts.
Designing with modular scales is one way to make more conscious, meaningful choices about measurement on the web. Modular scales work with—not against—responsive design and grids, provide a sensible alternative to basing our compositions on viewport limitations du jour, and help us achieve a visual harmony not found in compositions that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers. Tim Brown shows us how.
Web fonts are here. Now that browsers support real fonts in web pages and we can license complete typefaces for such use, it's time to think pragmatically about how to use real fonts in our web projects. Above all, we need to know how our type renders in screens, in web browsers. To that end, Tim Brown has created Web Font Specimen, a handy, free resource web designers and type designers can use to see how typefaces will look on the web.
