As an artist and designer, achieving a level of satisfaction with any client comes with the expectation that quite often we will disagree when it comes to our design ideas. That comes with the territory and applies to logo design, branding, advertising and all other forms of artistic expression.
However when it comes to creating a web site and designing for the Internet, there are certain boundaries and guidelines that a designer should conform to in order to please the most important element of the project - your web site visitors.
Believe it or not the most specific disagreements I have experienced have come in the selection of fonts. As you know there are thousands - maybe millions of typestyles to choose from. But when applying that design choice to the Internet, the truth is you should select from only a handful.
Short story is, you can apply any font to your web pages that you like but if the user visiting your web site doesn't have that same font installed on their system they won't see it. It will default to whatever font their system has been set to use in the event that a font is missing.
There is also the given fact that not everyone uses the same size monitor, uses the same monitor resolution settings, or even has the same strength of vision. Having said that, the readability of your font selection comes into play as well.
Reflecting on these technical tidbits of typestyle trivia, I managed to dig up a great article and survey from my bookmarks that explains things in detail and presents a great visual example of what can happen if an unwise font selection is made.
However when it comes to creating a web site and designing for the Internet, there are certain boundaries and guidelines that a designer should conform to in order to please the most important element of the project - your web site visitors.
Believe it or not the most specific disagreements I have experienced have come in the selection of fonts. As you know there are thousands - maybe millions of typestyles to choose from. But when applying that design choice to the Internet, the truth is you should select from only a handful.
Short story is, you can apply any font to your web pages that you like but if the user visiting your web site doesn't have that same font installed on their system they won't see it. It will default to whatever font their system has been set to use in the event that a font is missing.
There is also the given fact that not everyone uses the same size monitor, uses the same monitor resolution settings, or even has the same strength of vision. Having said that, the readability of your font selection comes into play as well.
Reflecting on these technical tidbits of typestyle trivia, I managed to dig up a great article and survey from my bookmarks that explains things in detail and presents a great visual example of what can happen if an unwise font selection is made.
If you find yourself on a web page, blog or news site of interest you will usually find an icon something similar to the icons pictured to the right of this paragraph. Other times it is a text link like the one I have at the top of this blog. These links and icons vary from site to site, but after a few glances you will begin to become more familiar with them. When logged into your Google Reader account you can simply click on the link or icon and the following page will allow you to click on "Add To Google Reader". All set!
