Blog 4
Written by John Ramsey Monday, 02 February 2009 21:32
Mark Boulton's article "Five Simple Steps to Better Typography" illustrates five important ways to better use text within a webpage. His suggestions are things that one would normally not think about when placing text on a website. One of his rules is to avoid "hanging" text. This means that the indentations are correct for certain lines of text. Bullet points is an example. He suggests to avoid unnecessary indentations at the beginning of bullet points and to space the other lines accordingly. This makes a big difference because if the bulleted list begins on a different vertical line than the rest of the text, it makes the eye jump unnecessarily.
Ligatures are also talked about in another point of his. Ligatures are combined letters of text. For instance, when the two letters "fi" are typed together in certain fonts, the two letters are combined because the kerning between the letters are not far enough. This is interesting because this is a problem that people usually do not look for in text. He goes on to say that ligatures can be used for linguistic purposes. An example is when "AE" are combined to create a linguistic symbol. Being mindful of the possibilities of ligatures is very important in creating the correct message within text.
-JR