Monday, 14 April 2008
Typesetting for the screen
Back in the day setting type was an art. A very time consuming, laborious and expensive aspect of advertising and publishing. More type is being set then ever today; however, far less time, if any, is spent thinking about how to best present letters and words in a pleasing and effective manner.Most of today's type is consumed on the screen. By this I mean we read less on paper and more on our computer and other electronic screens. Thank goodness there are serious limitations on the internet. Not all fonts are web friendly, here is a good wikipedia reference on this subject.
In simple terms there are less than a dozen fonts that you can count on displaying properly. Here is an example based on the fonts that are available in blogger.
Typesetting for the screen-ArialTypesetting for the screen-Courier
Typesetting for the screen-Georgia
Typesetting for the screen-Lucida Grande
Typesetting for the screen-Times
Typesetting for the screen-Trebuchet
Typesetting for the screen-Verdana
The art of typesetting has in someways experienced a renaissance with the world wide web. If you search the subject of typesetting you will be overwhelmed by the amount of information and content dedicated to this subject. A good example is typofile, a website dedicated to type and backed by a company specialising in user interface.
posted by bbm
