typography

How often have you seen a "completed" site that still has lorem ipsum text lurking in the quiet corners? While we often strive for perfection in our designs and code, I am reminded every time I stumble across a garbled bit of lorem ipsum that not all aspects of web development process are given the attention they deserve.

Developing a complete and detailed suite of typographic elements is an often-overlooked aspect of the process. While not always as prominent or exciting as other graphic elements, typography is an essential part of every site and does most of the heavy lifting to fulfill each page's purpose: transferring information.

While I can't do anything about lazy lorem ipsum use, I've been working on a tool that helps develop beautiful and robust online typography.

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There have been a couple of articles lately regarding fluid type.

Matt Smith (calling it "flexible type"):

My preferred approach for more flexible type is to calculate the font size based on the viewport height and width using the :root selector

Richard Rutter (calling it "Responsive Display Text"):

In one fell swoop you can set the size of a display heading to be proportional to the screen or browser width, rather than choosing from a scale in a series of media queries.

Both are all about leveraging viewport units to size type that doesn't jump from size to size at breakpoints, but gracefully scales.

I'd highly recommend checking out Mike Riethmuller's Fluid type though, which is nearly just as simple but allows for setting minimum and maximum sizes, which feels like the way to go for me.

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I think I had the same wooahhhhh coool reaction as so many others did when this tweet was going around:

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If you were developing sites in 2006, then you may have worked with a designer like me who was all up in your business about fonts not looking exactly the same in the browser as they did in mockups.

Then you may have tried explaining to me the pains of cross-browser compatibility and how different browsers render fonts differently from one another. In response, I likely would have sent you an image file that contains the content instead to make sure everything looked the same in all browsers. Yes, I was one of those designers.

Web fonts have come a very long way since then and we now have tools to tweak the way fonts render in browsers. Some have been around for quite a while. I remember my mind nearly bursting with excitement when I discovered FitText.js and Lettering.js way back when.

There are still plenty of situations today where adjusting fonts is needed to ensure the best legibility despite having all these fancy tools. We're going to cover a few of those in this post along with methods for how to deal with them.

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There was a time when the smart move in picking fonts for a website was to a font-family that was supported across as many platforms as possible. font-family: Tahoma; and whatnot. Or even better, a font stack that would fall back to as-similar-as possible stuff, like font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif;.

These days, an astonishing number of sites are using custom fonts. 60%!

No surprise, there is also a decent amount of pushback on custom fonts. They need to be downloaded, thus there are performance/bandwidth hits. There is loads of nuance on how you load them.

Also no surprise, there is some advocacy for the return to local fonts. Fast! Good enough! Let's look at that for a sec, then also look at using them within SVG.

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