cazmockett.com

Next up was Mark Boulton, who wanted us to work with typography in a better way.

• Be Appropriate & Adaptable
  Typefaces tell stories, and the web is still playing catchup with this power. Comic Sans is appropriate for the menu at a greasy spoon cafe; you wouldn’t want an invitation to a Black Tie event done in it though. Similarly, the BBC’s use of Gill Sans evokes order and authority. The BBC logo has a twist – by reversing the type and blocking out the shapes of Gill Sans.
  Don’t let type and design get in the way of words.
  Be adaptable to requirements, and appropriate for the story.
• Use Rhythm
  Richard Rutter’s Compose To A Vertical Rhythm explains about using the line height and leading of your blocks of text to best advantage. The basic theory goes: 12px font height with 18px between lines, give a line height of 1.5. You can use incremental leading to make 4 lines of text in the main body of a page line up with 5 lines of text in a sidebar.
  [Text in the sidebar bears no relation to the main body copy. It looks messy.]
  The maths gets a bit hairy: 18px x 4 lines = 72px for the main body. 72px ÷ 5 lines = 14.4px for the sidebar
  If you’re using 10px height for your sidebar text, 14.4 ÷ 10px = 1.44 line height. You may find the sidebar top-margin property needs a bit of tweaking to get it to line up properly.
  [This looks much better now everything is aligned vertically]
• Optical Grey
  If you squint at a block of text, you’ll see the page has different tonal ranges depending on font, leading, letter spacing etc.
  Verdana has a more open shape, so is paler at smaller sizes.
  Combining serif and sans-serif fonts can be effective, giving different “colours”. Minimize dark grey and balance the line height.
• Use The Right Tools For The Job
  Hyphens “-” are NOT em dashes!! “—”. Use an em — or en – where appropriate.
• Use a Grid System
  Use grids as a tool to help you organise information. How to decide how big the grid unit should be? You can subdivide the units too – you might have a 3em high by 4.5em wide block, which divides nicely into 2×3 squares each of 1.5em width and height.
  Choose gutter sizes carefully, it can depend on the relationship between whitespace and font size.
  Using Alternate Row colours in tables must be done with care – don’t use colours which are too strong.
  Set type to your grid, and align everything! The smallest error can really stick out.

In Summary
Typography is all about the details. Tiny increments can make a huge difference. The full slides are available at Mark’s website.

Dan Cederholm took us through the various elements of interface design that a good juggler should be able to “keep in the air”.

[Dan and his interface-juggling octopus]

Colour
Colour evokes an emotional response in the viewer, and we need to be careful when choosing a palette. At Wellstyled.com, there’s a handy widget for generating complimentary colour schemes. Try it out.

Dan had mocked up a site especially to demonstrate some of his points – go have a giggle over at ToupéePal!

One good way of choosing a palette is by taking shades from a photo – either sample direstly, or pixellate it and use some of the blocks. Dan often starts with colour as the inspiration for a site and works from there. He will re-use certain strategic colours throughout a site, eg Links, headings etc. The colour used for links will always carry weight in the design.

Typography
Great typography is actually invisible – we don’t notice it. But do it badly and it sticks out like a sore thumb. He recommended the article, Web Design is 95% Typography to read.

There are a limited number of fonts we can realistically guarantee a user having on their system, but within these constraints, we can still get creative. Try using the text-transform uppercase or lowercase styles, change the letterspacing, text-align, leading etc to vary the typographical colour of a block of text. Good reading: “The Elements of Typographical Style” by Robert Bringhurst, if you can find it. Read more on applying it to the web here.

Favicons
Could be regarded as the most important design element on your site! They are the thing that represents it in the shortcut icon, browser address bar etc.

[Subtraction.com uses each site's favicon as shorthand branding for the link]

So when creating a favicon, it has to be something memorable. They must:

• Scale well down to 16×16 pixels
• If the whole logo doesn’t work, choose a fragment to focus on
• Use something unique about the site that still ties in with the branding

Icon files can be made with Iconographer or a plugin for Photoshop. As well as the standard 16×16 icon, 32×32 and 64×64 pixel icons can be inserted into the same .ico file. There’s an interesting collection of Favicons at Delta Tango Bravo’s blog.

Add Detail But Not Complexity
Understand the limitations of the browser, and suggest the box [model] but with minimal suggestions. Perhaps use just one rounded corner on an element. Re-use graphic elements where you can.

Microformats
If you site contains any sort of contact information, events lists, reviews or relationships, then you should be marking them up with Microformats. Using what works today can encourage others to do the same:

[The Microformats can be used by people, applications and as hooks for CSS]

Brian Suda did some parsing of Cork’d for Microformats, and used this information to add wine reviews (from Cork’d) to his Scrugy site, where you can learn all about wine. Corkd’s Microformats had produced an accidental API. If you were to mash this up with a list of your XFN friends, you could use it as a filter for just returning reviews from your trusted sources.

I’ve been meaning to experiment with sIFR headline styling ever since hearing Dave Shea’s Fine Typography On The Web piece during the @media 2006 conference. I’ve finally got a demo going at playpen #6.

What does sIFR mean?
sIFR stands for Scalable Inline Flash Replacement, and is an unobtrusive JavaScript/Flash solution for providing lovely fonts on your site (eg for headlines) whilst still remaining accessible, and not relying on that font being installed on a user’s machine. Read more about the techniqute by visitng the official sIFR Wiki/Documentation site. H1 and H2 headings are best restyled using sIFR, rather than large bodies of text. If a browser does not have JavaScript enabled, the headlines will just be styled by the regular CSS definitions, so it degrades gracefully.

Why Bother?
There are several techniques for image replacement. The Gilder/Levin method is one such (see Dave Shea’s article which explains some of the others too). Gilder/Levin is recognised as one of the best from an accessibility standpoint. But the down side, is that you have to manually generate each graphic used to replace your text, plus add a specific CSS rule for each in your stylesheet. That’s all very well if you have a smallish, static site, and not many headings to replace. But what about database-driven sites and blogs, where you don’t know in advance what the text will be which needs replacing? The only practical way to go is sIFR under these circumstances.

Where Can I Get It?
More information and a download for the code can be found at Mike Davidson’s sIFR page.

Where Is It Used?
Keep an eye out for any sites which use unusual typography for headings or recurrent elements. If this is a database-driven site (such as ecommerce or blog), the chances are, sIFR will be the method that’s used. Two likely candidates off the top of my head are:

• iPod411.com
• Bobble’s Blog (it’s not all about cup cakes)

by Dave Shea. Downloadable from Dave’s website archive.

Typography affects tone. Leading affects readability. Across all platforms and OS’s, the designer only has about 10 fonts to rely on being installed – not very good.

• Times New Roman – if you use this, it looks like you’ve made a mistake, or your style sheet hasn’t loaded!
• Arial – really a ripoff of Helvetica, a safe choice, but boring. Read: The Scourge Of Arial
• Verdana / Georgia are a good pair for sans + serif fonts. But they could become non-safe backups in due course as MacOS X will not neccessarily carry them.
• Trebuchet MS / Comic Sans alternatives, but Comic only really any good for doing kiddies stuff.
• Lucida Sans / Palatino (serif) might like to think about them.

Font Survey websites are all very well, but they don’t tend to be very representative of the general populace as the only people that fill in the surveys are the sort of folks who care about typography!

Fonts to look out for in future release of Windows (Vista):

• Calibri (sans) – good for body copy
• Cambria – a bit more subtle than Georgia
• Candara – probably best reserved for headlines
• Consolas – a monospaced font which will be great for code examples
• Constantina – better for larger sized text, eg headlines and pullquotes
• Corbel – excellent all-rounder

NEVER USE THE FONT TAG AGAIN!!!

So how do we get sexy fonts on web pages?

• You could embed a font in a page with this:
  

  @font-face { family:myfont; src=url(myfont, eot);
  } in the css, then,
  h3 {font-family: myfont, serif;}
  in the markup

  This has its problems, mainly that Font Foundaries are very ansty about you distributing copyrighted fonts.

• Scalable Vector Graphics would be fantastic but most browsers aren’t currently supporting SVG.
• sIFR – scalable Inline Flash Replacement. Uses Flash
  to transform text in <h2> tag, say, to a flash object representing the h2. Need to embed some javascript to do it:

  <script
  src=”sifr/sifr.js”
  type=”text/javascript”>
  </script>

  Fallbacks – if you don’t have JS or flash, you can write a fallback to style the original h2 with CSS as now.

• Image Replacement – two methods: Phark (negative text indent) which can be a bit dodgy for accessibility
• Gilder/Levin – need to look up
• CSS3 – but can’t remember what he said about this

So what to use for various circumstances?

• CMS – Use CSS or sIFR
• Ensured Control – Use an Image, Image Replacement or sIFR
• Kerning Control – Use Image or IR
• Well-styled – Use Img, IR or possibly sIFR (in due course) but not CSS
• Font Scalability – Use CSS, possibly sIFR later
• Search Engines – Use CSS for best results

References: Typographic Design: Form & Communication
A List Apart – Dynamic Text Replacement
Font Explorer X – windows version due soon.
Googled for a “Flash of unstyled content” – there is a fix for IE.