Presentation

Typography

In 2006, Oliver Reichenstein posted an essay, 95% of Web Design is Typography. It attracted attention then and still does. It upset some readers, particulary because of the 95% in the title, about which Reichenstein said “I should have kept the original title: ‘Webdesign is all about typography. Period’ ”.

It is a very important point. A large part of what we do on the web is read and write, therefore much of our attention should be focused on how we present text.

Basic Typography – Mostly about how to make web sites easy to read on all devices and when projected.

Unicode characters – for special characters ©, punctuation ¡, accented letters ä, currency symbols £, math ±, and ligatures Æ.

Fractions – unicode for fractions – this: ½, instead of this: 1/2.

Embedding Google Fonts – A tutorial showing the steps for embedding Google Fonts.

5 Fonts – examples of fonts used so the text will be easy to read. All have large character sets and include four styles.

Jane Austen (1777-1817) - Novels – All six novels in HTML, less than 5MB in total size.

Unsupported languages – a list of Southeast Asian languages which have spotty support or none. (This was true in 2012, when the list was first posted, now – 10.7.2014 – all are supported.)

A sample institutional homepage – a model of homepage, using only text, for an institution of higher education. The links in the top row are the only ones which work.