Nice Web Type

Scott Gilbertson:

The web today is feeling less like a thing that lives in your browser and more like something that exists in the space between things.

Vincent Hardy and Alan Stearns for Adobe:

Our goal with this effort is to help move the web forward, and to improve the CSS layout features available to content authors and web developers.

The minute-long, harmonica-rific video provides context for the plans outlined in the post — plans that include separating features into three modules: CSS Regions, CSS Exclusions, and CSS Fragmentation.

Andy Johnson:

Maybe it’s not a new tool I need. Maybe it’s a new design strategy.

Kyle Meyer:

When you open up your tracking, the text will always push out to the left as letter-spacing is applied from the right. As a result, if you’re centering or aligning your type to the right, it will be a few pixels further to the left than it should be.

Never noticed that.

Alex Morris on Gridset, coming this summer from Mark Boulton Design.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher critiques Starbucks.com’s compositional shifts:

The right-hand column simply swings down to the bottom, regardless of what’s in it. If you instead assigned a few content types based on the elements within the content and what it was supposed to accomplish, you could apply different rules to how each type of content shifts.

And:

However you tackle the problem, you need to be thinking more about relationships and priorities than about locations and sizes.

This was a blog post of Sara’s, expanding upon her A List Apart article.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Understanding which content chunks exist is just the start. Now you need to understand why each one matters to the whole—and how much it matters. This allows us to make decisions about how content is organized, prioritized, and displayed for different screen sizes, contexts, or purposes.

Easier to orchestrate compositions if you know the reason for each chunk.

Ryan Singer:

When there’s too much to build at once, review becomes unfocused because the set of variables to evaluate is too large.

Good advice, and it applies to responsive design. Trying to make whole compositions flex and respond, all at once, is not only daunting — it leads to generalization and compromise. Instead, start with type. Make chunk-based decisions. Orchestrate compositions.

Frank E. Blokland:

I consider [type] the sum of particles. Defining these particles not only provides means for a better understanding of the underlying harmonics and dynamics, but also creates parameters for the artificial creation and computerized measurement of type and typography. Computerized measurement could even form the basis for parametrized legibility research.

If type is the sum of particles, then what is typography? What forces are at play within and among typographic elements? What stuff binds typeset words into typographic chunks? Do viewport dimensions, and other qualities related to the observer’s perspective, have a place in this model?

For the record, I’m extremely skeptical about parameter-based type design. Parameter-based typography on the other hand, given the right kind of data (and enough of it), is intriguing. Not because it would produce “ideal typography” or some such nonsense, but because it could mean fewer instances of very poor typesetting. Also, I want a “The Sum of Particles” t-shirt.

Donny Truong:

Unlike many virtuous beboppers including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie who squeezed out as much notes as they could in their solos, Davis left plenty of space in his phrasing to allow listeners to absorb his thoughts.

Negative space flexes too.