The process of arranging type on a page or screen. Done correctly, it’s an art form. Done poorly, it’s a web page. Just kidding about that last part. When a typographer does a poor job, you notice it. The page is hard to read, looks messy or noisy as a whole, and can make your eyes hurt. When she does a great job, you notice it as well; the page looks soothing and pleasing, you retain more of what you read, and you read it faster. Good typography, you don’t notice at all.

On the web, typography can be a crap shoot. As good as CSS might be, it doesn’t give a whole lot of typographic control. And, unless you do all your pages as 300dpi graphics, you have no final say over the typefaces your website will be rendered in.

I am a self-described fontaholic and typography snob. One of my guilty pleasures is handwriting and retro fonts, but on a more serious side I am at once gratified to see how easy it is to use computers to produce great layouts, and yet disheartened to see how little it’s done, and how much horrible typography is generated now-a-days.

One Inch Frame uses Georgia, one of Microsoft’s Core Web Fonts, which are available on Mac OS X and Windows, and Linux.

Resources

• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
  The original book is the bible for typographers. This web site is dedicated to bringing that book’s theory and practice to the web.
• Five Simple Steps to Better Typography
  Simple things you can do to make your pages look better.
• The non-typographer’s guide to practical typeface selection
  For the love of $DEITY, please put down that Arial and Times New Roman. And don’t you dare touch that Comic Sans!
• PingMag’s interview with Erik Spiekermann
  A good interview with one of today’s greatest typeface designers
• The Seven Worst Fonts
  rants about some of the most overused and ugly typefaces out there.
• Ban Comic Sans
  a site dedicated to getting rid of one of the worst typefaces ever.
• The Trouble with EM and EN
  When to use em-dashes, en-dashes, hyphen, and minus. (There are rules here).
• A good list of corporations and their corporate typefaces
• We have the tools. We have the technology. Let us all begin using baseline grids for web typography. Must. Read. And. Understand.
• Typographica - Our favorite fonts of 2005
  A list of some of the finest OpenType fonts released in 2005. Includes the incredible Ministry Script and my favorite, Garamond Premier Pro.
• 300 Free TrueType Fonts you should have
• A list of fonts used on “Web 2.0” sites

My favorite typefaces

• Garamond Premier Pro
• Lucida Sans
• Ministry Script
• Palatino
• Frutiger
• Birch
• Gill Sans
• Helvetica Neue
• Goudy
• Trebuchet MS

Identifying Fonts

A site called Identifont will ask you a series of illustrated questions about a piece of type and attempt to identify it based on your responses. I tested it with some of my favorite fonts; here are the results:

• Blue Highway: Identified as Blue Highway
• Garamond Premier Pro: Identified as EF Garamond
• SilkScreen: Not recognized (ok, that’s sort of a trick question)
• Birch: Birch