Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by etrinh 4859 days ago
This seems like a great starting point for anyone who is interested in designing a website with a strong emphasis on text content (think blogs, online magazines, etc). If you've ever tried to formally study typography, it can be pretty overwhelming. I'm a web developer with an interest in design, and type is one of those things that seems simple until you realize you have to understand it intimately at multiple abstraction levels (individual letterforms, lines, and blocks of text). Glad to see there's a resource out there that uses typography best practices and makes them sensible defaults.
1 comments

Can you recommend any good overviews of the subject? I'm not a designer, but I've always been very interested in typography.
The best book I know on the topic is Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style. Highly, highly recommended.

Other great books: Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type and James Felici's The Complete Manual of Typography. Both are really solid.

Books that would be worth checking out at a library: Richard Hendel's On Book Design and Ruari McLean's Typographers on Type. More philosophical in nature, less practical.

For a practical (but involved) overview, there's this: http://webtypography.net/toc/

It's a classic typography book translated to a web context with the relevant CSS styles. Pretty cool.

For a more easily digestible (and interactive!) overview, the one that comes to mind is the Interactive Guide to Blog Typography: http://www.kaikkonendesign.fi/typography/

If you'd like to check out more resources, hackdesign, a newsletter of curated design-related links, is focusing on typography this month: http://hackdesign.org/courses/

This online version of "Designing for the Web" [1] is a very good (and free!) read. Definitely helped me understand some of the principles of typography, even layout and colour. The "Getting Started" and "Research" sections can be skipped without issue.

[1] http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/