All posts tagged ‘typography’

File Under: CSS, Visual Design, Web Standards
Feb
8
2012

Responsive Design Tricks: Fluid Typography With CSS 3

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Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

Building responsive websites means that your design has to adapt to different screen sizes. That there is no such thing as “pixel perfect” has long been a maxim of good web design, but nowhere is this more true than when you start working with percentage widths, em-based type and other flexible techniques of responsive design. While fluid grids, adaptive images and other tools help, sometimes even basic things like the flow of type can look wrong without a little extra help.

One common problem when designing for multiple devices is handling the changes that happen when the user rotates the screen. It’s frustrating to see your elegant portrait-oriented designs fall apart as the device moves to landscape mode (or vice versa). Frequently the problem is that images, videos and other embedded content in your page is sized in relation to the pixel width of the viewport, but the type is not. That means that the type fails to adapt to layout changes, leaving ugly gaps, whitespace or hard-to-read, overly long lines.

There are a number of ways to solve this problem, but one of the simplest and easiest is to use fluid typography in addition to your fluid grid. BBC developer Mark Hurrell wrote up an excellent tutorial some time ago that shows how, by specifying font sizes in rems, you can “adjust every font-size on the page by using media-queries to change the font-size set on the BODY or HTML element according to viewport width.”

To find the right size type for various screen widths, Hurrell calculates a resolution-independent font scale based on target widths. That is then applied using a series of media queries and the new CSS 3 unit rem. The rem unit means ems relative to the root (the HTML) element. That means your type gets proportionally larger overall, rather than in relation to its parent element as would happen with a simple em. As Hurrell notes, support is pretty much universal on tablets and phones (browsers that don’t support it will fall back to px sizing, so all is not lost).

In the end what you get using rems and media queries is fluid typography that scales just like a fluid grid. That means that when the device rotates the type resizes to fit the new screen dimensions. For more details on how to make it work on your site be sure to check out the Responsive News blog post, which also has a few links to websites already using this trick.

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File Under: Visual Design
Nov
11
2011

Thinking with Type: Brush Up Your Typography Skills

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The power and potential impact of typography on the web has grown by leaps and bounds with the advent of widespread browser support for @font-face and font hosting services like Adobe’s Typekit.

Of course with new tools come new problems. Many web developers don’t know much about fonts and typography. After all it used to be there were only six reliable font choices on the web — why bother learning about something you couldn’t use? But that, like so many other things in web development, is no longer true.

If the web’s newfound typography options leave you feeling a bit behind, head over to Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type website. The site is a goldmine of information on typography dos and don’ts both on the web and off. The site is not, however, so much about fonts, but rather about type as a visual element and what it can do (both good and bad) within a design.

If you’ve ever wondered why your small caps don’t look right, how to properly kern text or how you can use contrasting font weights to create more visually engaging banners, Thinking With Type has the answers for you.

There’s even a section on working with multi-column grids, something that will hopefully be possible in the near future as more browsers begin to support the various CSS grid layout systems.

The Thinking With Type website is a companion to Lupton’s book of the same name, which is well worth picking up if you have any interest in learning more about typography.

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File Under: CSS, JavaScript, Visual Design, Web Basics
May
17
2011

Improve Your Website’s Typography With Kern.js

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Web typography used to be something of an oxymoron, but recent browser advances and tools like Typekit have helped bring web typography out of the dark ages with custom fonts. Thanks to JavaScript libraries like Lettering.js you can tweak those custom fonts — targeting specific words or letters — and adjust them to your liking.

Lettering.js even makes it possible to do custom kerning on the web. Kerning refers to the space between characters in proportional width fonts. CSS has long offered the letter-spacing property, but because it applies to an entire element — for example an h2 tag — what you’re really doing with letter-spacing is adjusting the tracking.

To actually control kerning you need to target each letter individually. Because Lettering.js can wrap each letter in your text with span tags, you can then target each span separately, adjusting the spacing of individual letters, or, kerning.

But, handy as Lettering.js is, tweaking the letter-spacing, hitting refresh, tweaking some more and so on is still a rather tedious way to improve your kerning. That’s why designer Brendan Stromberger created the Kern.js JavaScript bookmarklet. Used in conjunction with Lettering.js, Kern.js allows you to adjust kerning by simply selecting and dragging letters (or you can use the arrow keys). Kerning adjustments can be made in pixels or ems, so even you if you have a liquid layout there’s no reason you can’t get in on the kerning fun. Once you’ve got your kerning looking the way you’d like, just hit the “finish editing” button and Kern.js will spit out the necessary CSS to apply.

Kerning is admittedly a somewhat nerdy pursuit in a field that’s already pretty nerdy to begin with, but if you’ve developed an obsession with good looking typography, you know that there’s more to it than just dropping in some Typekit fonts. Thanks to Lettering.js and Kern.js, you can finally improve kerning on the web without the tedium of endless page refreshes.

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File Under: CSS, Fonts, Visual Design
Nov
4
2010

Good Web Typography Is Easy With Type-a-File

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The web is awash with CSS frameworks. But, while frameworks can be great for prototyping and quick mockups, they’re often overkill for most projects. It’s also pretty rare to find a framework that meets all of your design needs.

If you’re just looking for a way to get some great typography on your site, but don’t need a grid or other tools that often come with a full-blown framework, check out Type-a-File. Type-a-File isn’t exactly a framework, it’s more specific — a set of typography styles that you can adapt into your CSS.

Type-a-File is the work of designer Russ Maschmeyer and currently offers eight different typographic style sheets, designed, in Type-a-File’s words, to “give your web typography a head start.”

The style sheets takes advantage of some of the new features in CSS 3 like column-count and border-radius, as well as services like TypeKit for fancy fonts. Fortunately, the vast majority of the rules aren’t based on the still-nascent CSS 3 spec, so nearly all the effects will work in older browsers as well.

In addition to basic rules for typographic elements — h1-6, p, lists, cite and so on — Type-a-File has a few classes you can apply to pull quotes, create “kickers” or “sidenotes” and change default headings.

Type-a-File is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so if you’d like to take one of the eight example style sheets and use it to build something of your own you’re feel to do so. You can even submit it back to Type-a-File for inclusion on the site.

Photo by the four elements/Flickr/CC

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File Under: Browsers, Visual Design, Web Basics
Nov
2
2010

Adobe Shows Off Fancy WebKit-Based Typography

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Typography on the web has improved by leaps and bounds since the dark days of the blink tag, but it’s still a long way from ideal.

Sure there are great ways to serve custom fonts, and you can even use JavaScript libraries like Lettering.js for even more control over your layout. But when it comes to the flow of text around images, pull quotes and other block level elements, well, web typography falls apart.

The demo movie above from Adobe shows off some WebKit-based experiments that seek to change that. Adobe Engineering VP Paul Gubbay narrates and the demo, and he shows how his team is extending the WebKit browser to do some new typographic tricks. WebKit is the open source engine behind Safari and Google Chrome, and it powers the most popular mobile browsers like the ones on the iPhone, iPad, iPod and all the Android phones. The demo certainly shows some impressive results.

However, we’re a bit suspicious of the methodology behind the results. Gubbay talks about extending WebKit’s CSS support via vendor prefixes, but neglects to mention what those prefixes are built against — in other words, there’s no mention of submitting a standard that other browsers could work from.

In fact, while the demo is pretty cool, the whole overview is too vague to say much about other than, “that would be nice.”

Also, note to Adobe, you don’t need to work with Google to work on WebKit. It’s an open source project. You can just submit your patches (instructions are here).

[via John Nack]

Update: The original post got Paul Gubbay’s name wrong. We have updated it. (Sorry, Paul!) Also, be sure to read his response in the comments.

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