Typography’s not on the web, it IS the web – FOWD

This talk revolves around typography’s close ties to language, and how typography could evolve on the web in years to come Mark Boulton markboultondesign

What is typography on the web?

Lots of designers get frustrated when thinking about typography on the web.

Type as language

Typo has one plain duty before it and that is to convey nformation in writing. Emil Ruder

Language is information. Author’s conceptual structure. (Lists, bullets, conceptual model of what you’re writing) – Reader’s conceptual model Designer breaks that gap: he is the connection. Brand values & Art direction

Type as structure

  Document structure HTML Semantic meaning

Type as interface

Type as data?

Don’t either know the answer for this… Everybody is a designer There’s a bit missing… Everybody can do design. D.I.Y. Ellen Lupton. ‘wtf have they done to my layout?’ Bad type? (on comic sans) #indefenseofcomicsans Pointy serif: points are invisible some parts invisiblein lower points Alien heads found in Georgia: big fat serifs. Small sizes on screen, the serif seem to vanish. Most designers know that printed typography is pretty different. Mark is working by the moment in Drupal(tm).

• Drupal.org will serve 28000 pages
• wil be downloaded 200 times
• 7 new drupal sites will lunch
• 6 of them will be ugly

One of their principles: help people to make good design ( ux decisions as they build their site using Drupal.

Provide smart defaults. 82 choices on default wysiwyg.  flickr.com/fphotos/aberra/358888041   Choose a headline typeface: Goergia or Helvetica. If they had that choice, they can choose one of the two. Help people make good design decisions. @font-face: Lets have a think before we open the flood gates. It’s not smart to allow hundred of font-faces.  There are really great typefaces, or awfull ones, but help your users with the decisions.  

Too many options