Michael Doyle | Blog

Web Design – Typography

I've usually just relied on Verdana and eyeballing layouts when taking typography into consideration. At the moment, I'm living and breathing typography for the website I'm currently creating. It's a simple website, but I'm focusing on the rules for typography on the web, web safe fonts, spacing, leading, etc. It's one of my biggest weaknesses when designing websites so I'm researching as much as possible into it at the moment. Some interesting sites I've come across are:

Basic rules for web typography:

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/02/10-web-typography-rules-every-designer-should-know-2/

Browser safe fonts:

http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html

Fonts bundled with Mac, Windows, Adobe and Office:

http://media.24ways.org/2007/17/fontmatrix.html

Embedding custom fonts with Javascript:

http://typeface.neocracy.org/

Smashing Magazine has a great article on 50 different web typography tools:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/27/css-typographic-tools-and-techniques/

Web – Graded Browser Support

When developing web sites, how the site works and looks in different browsers should be tested. This can be a time consuming process of creating custom hacks, tweaking code, developing alternate workarounds or even ignoring incompatibility issues.

One of the main problems confronted is the selection of which browsers should be selected to test with. Yahoo developer network has created a list of "A-Grade Browsers". A-Grade Browsers are fully functional browsers which account for 96% market share.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/

Testing time can be greatly reduced when used with browsershots.org

CSS – CSS Reset

There are many hacks to get past cross-browser compatibility problems. I've run into way too many of them, even though I regularly check sites in both IE and FF. One of the reasons for the problems is that some browsers add padding and margin sizes to certain elements. To remove this Yahoo has a utility called Reset CSS. IT removes all added borders, margins, everything to level the playing field so you can precisely define how you want elements defined without anything added by a browser.

UPDATE: After reading some of the comments and advise on resetting, a lot of people have highly recommended Eric Meyer's CSS Reset stylesheet.