An Event Apart: Universal Typography
At An Event Apart in San Francisco CA 2013, Tim Brown shared fundamental best practices for typography and how to make the most of them on the Web. Here's my notes from his talk Universal Typography:
- The Web is the best place for text: it can be searched, copied, translated, printed, and more.
- We're doing things with text that couldn't have been imagined when many typographic standards were established and thought out but that doesn't mean we don't keep doing our job. There will always be things for which designers and developers aren't prepared. The web is always changing. Think abstractly but work in the details.
- Characters are unique characters. Glyphs are representations of these characters. Type designers don't just think about glyphs, they spend a lot of time focused on the negative spaces between letters. Drawing and spacing type are simultaneous parts of the same process.
- Size, leading, and measure are the balance