Mark Boulton - the Typography King - gave a good talk as always. He pretty much outlined the importance of typography on the web and how it is our responsibility as designers to be aware of this importance and to choose our fonts wisely.
One of the ways he illustrated typography’s importance was by stripping the images out of Flickr and youtube and taking the colours out leaving us with a black and white box wireframe. By doing this obviously makes the text on the page stand out more on the page and makes it easier to see the hierarchical structure of the type design.
Whilst this is something I am acutely aware of it is still something I am learning. I am able to implement the important hierarchical design and allow easy eye scanning of headings in level of importance, but my font face choice still needs a bit of work. I think it’s because I’m a bit of a perfectionist…I’m never happy until I know it’s the best and I’ll often never be able to test all the possibilities.
Restrict Choice
I wonder whether one of the reasons why I have not mastered this aspect of design yet is because of Mark’s final points. He said that there is perhaps too much choice when it comes to choosing your web fonts.
Now hang on…hear me out. I have always wanted the @font-face feature in CSS to get moving and be decided on and implemented by web browsers. However, imagine the websites that would appear if inexperienced designers got their hands on this. The ability to use any font ever created on a web page would not be a good thing. Some fonts aren’t designed for use in websites, they are primarily designed for use in print. And some fonts are just damn ugly, but that wouldn’t stop ill-informed people using them.
The @font-face feature would also open up choice to a ridiculous level. I haven’t got time to test all the different versions of Helvetica now available to me to impose on my users. So this near infinite choice of type faces probably wouldn’t be a good thing for my web typography mastering.
Mark divulged some good stories to describe the choice dilemma. One of them was the jam seller who had around 40 types of jam on his stall. He didn’t sell many. Potential purchasers were overwhelmed by the choice and couldn’t make their mind up. When the seller reduced his variety to 6, sales went up 10 fold.
So maybe we need to do that with web fonts. Start with a select number of fonts for headings, then by choosing one out of this small selection, the body text font and other design decisions would be decided automatically due to tried and tested successful past choices.
It is perhaps a bit strict, but I think I am going to look for a set number of typeface combinations and just go with them for a while and see how I get on.
Bad typographical choices
Mark also threw in some bad typo choices that are always fun. The old Comic Sans font used on a police poster. Genius! He also said he had started a campaign in defence of Comic Sans. It didn’t go down too well with designers, but I have to agree with him. He says that Comic Sans is not a bad font (it’s used well in the wireframing app, Balsamiq), it’s just been used out of context so many times that people think it’s a horrible font. However, I recently photoshopped some comic speech bubbles onto a photo and chose Comic Sans as the typeface. And it looked good. It was used in the right context.
Another point he made was that Times New Roman isn’t actually a web safe font. Because it looks crap on web pages. It is a serif font designed for print, but is shipped with Microsoft’s Windows and used as the default font on Office Word 2000. So just because loads of people have it and it will render if called in a website, doesn’t mean it’s web-safe. At small sizes it starts to break down because it’s serif hooks are thin and delicate and don’t bleed out on a screen as it does on paper.
So use Georgia instead. Perhaps a bit cliched these days but it is a font that was designed for the web first, thus given fatter hooks and curls. Oh and Mark doesn’t like sIFR.
Anyway, I’ll hopefully update you with my web typeface combinations when I have…erm…chosen them.