Sign up for the newsletterI send out a brief newsletter bringing you web typography tips (both design and technical) and occasional news about developments in web type (like browser support and news from the W3C), and my upcoming talks, podcasts, and workshops. I’m including the tips here as an archive, but if you want it in your inbox along with the news and whatnot, learn more and see the archive on the Newsletter page, or you can sign up directly here.
I’ve made a few mentions about variable fonts over the past weeks, and it’s high time I explain myself—and them—because they are really remarkable. So remarkable in fact that they’re just about the only thing I’ve been talking about at...
I was recently extended the honor of participating in the W3C Web Fonts Working Group as an Invited Expert. The group was previously responsible for bringing us the WOFF and WOFF2 font format standards, and has had its charter extended...
As I’m sure many of you do, I read a fair amount on the subject of web typography, performance, and design for the digital world in general. In doing so a bit more regularly since I starting this newsletter, I...
My new talk is about using some new developments in CSS and variable fonts to rethink how we create typographic systems on the web. There’s a lot going on in the talk, and I plan to get into these elements...
This week I thought I’d go over something I see often overlooked on web projects, leading to a lot of extra work on the part of the front end team. Covering the basics of @font-face declarations can make for much...
This week I’d like to explore something perhaps a bit whimsical, but nonetheless something with a clear place in design for the web: the end mark. Not of sentences in this case, but of texts. While there are three types...
I wrote about the basics of typesetting a paragraph on the web a few weeks ago, and focused on the three core elements of font-size, line-height, and line length. Following that issue, we dug into units of measure and typographic...
Ink and blood run thick in the streets when typographers debate typographic scale. Much of both have been spilled fighting for—and extolling the virtues of—the one perfect ratio between paragraphs and larger typographic elements (whichever ‘one’ that is). From Bringhurst...
I’d like to take a little time to talk about the various units of measure we have at our disposal, why you should focus on two or three and avoid some others—and explain a bit about why. If we don’t...
Now that I’ve got a couple issues out, I wanted to return to some typographic fundamentals—and I can’t think of a better way to convey them than in the form of the paragraph. I took a pretty deep dive into...
A ‘drop cap’ or ‘initial’ is a specifically-styled first letter of a block of text that is usually larger and sometimes more ornate than the surrounding letterforms. In centuries past these were often elaborately drawn, but the practice still continues...
Seeing as this is the very first issue, I didn't want to start with something too complicated—at the same time I wanted it to relate a time-tested typographic technique in graphic design: styling the first line of a block of...