OntoSearch

Ignore typography in web design only at your peril

Great typography is most essential to design. It is.

Very good typography is essential enough on a web page as it is in any other medium. Any thing, excellent or bad, under the sun and even beyond it hmm… that goes into making the web page pleasing to look at and enticing to read boils down to careful typography. You can not be spared if your internet site is not visually appealing or digitally inviting in the multitude of sites in cut-throat competition.

Before you make any excuses for a lack of great typography, you may possibly be out of the fray. It is high time you learnt fundamentals of typography that will support your internet site look — and benefit too — fundamentally various.

A word of relief for web designers! You are not alone on this side of the fence. Ninety percent of web pages that browsers look at have been poured- not created.

What designers have to pay heed to
Designers have to employ the tools and technique of typography in the finest achievable manner in conjunction with media needs, target audience aimed at, specialty of communication to be disseminated.

Designing for a computer screen has its own set of uniqueness and problems. Add to these the elastic nature of a web page, which has to work across various personal computer platforms and screen sizes, communication requirements.

The unfailing concern for designers need to be about a great match between the style, semantics, and intended impact of your text and corresponding properties of the typeface it uses

What typography indicates

A page designed to support a childrens TV program should be diverse for 1 designed for a politics course in a university. Similarly the text on the Financial Times Site , if it is performing its job proper, need to be be different from that of the The Tate Modern .

So typography, whether on the Web or otherwise has a job to do. This could be to support and re-enforce the message being presented by the content, or tell you some thing about the background and the implicit context, that the the page is component of.

Text alignment

Aligning text to the left, ragged on the right, increases reading speed simply because the straight left edge helps to anchor the eye when starting a new line

Line length

There seems to be little agreement on the finest length length for optimum reading speeds. The most commonly guidance is that limiting line length to 9 or 10 words can increases speed and comprehension.

Users read quicker when line lengths are long, even though they tend to prefer shorter line lengths. When designing, initial determine if performance or preference is crucial. If user performance is critical, use longer line lengths to boost reading speed.

Leading (line-height)

Set the leading larger than the default – as a rough guide 1.3cm of leading (130%) will make a huge difference to the readability of a web page. Leading and line length nevertheless are related; the longer the line the bigger you require to make the leading.

Newspapers have really short line lengths and very little leading – so they can fit as much text into a tiny space as feasible.

Option of fonts

Choose a font that is suitable to your subject matter. If you use more than two fonts on a page and it can start to look like a ransom note – distracting the users attention from the content. Off-line, headings are commonly set in a sans-serif font, with body text set in serif.

Morever, on-line, sans-serif are frequently used for both headings and body text; the cleaner outlines of the sans-serif fonts tends to make them simpler to read on low resolution screens. Don’t mix serif and sans-serif fonts in your body text, as it rarely looks good.

Italics

Prevent making use of italics for tiny text sizes: the problems of screen display of outline fonts has not entirely disappeared. Italized fonts look particularly bad at modest sizes – as italics do not straightforward to render using a square pixel grid. If you should use italics, steer clear of utilizing them for big blocks of text.

Use of capitals

Don’t use all caps for bodytype – or even capitalise all words in headings. The uniformally of size and shape of capitals make them harder to read than lower case letters.

Readability is increased if only the 1st letter in a heading is in capitals; every capital – being less recognizable – acts as an interruption to the eye as it scans across the text.

Contrast

Ensure great contrast between the text colour and the background colour.

Underline links

Make it effortless for visitors to comprehend what is a link and what is not a link. Do not rely exclusively on mouseovers to identify links, as this can be confusing and reduces usability.

Users scan web pages

For Service based site in specific, arrange your text for ‘scannability’, i.e have lots of headings, provide the most crucial ideas at the start of paragraphs, and use lists rather than dense passages of text when suitable.

In short, typography is not so pleasant (Scared? Not too difficult either) indicates to make your site pleasing to aesthetic senses of surfers. It is carried out painstakingly and carefully, but definitely, it is worth it. It can either pay you or leave you at peril. So, give it a thought where you are heading for.