Feb 19 2007 at 10:48pm
Check out the Typography on Joe Clark’s site
I came across Joe Clark’s site today, rather randomly through a series of links leading to his Letter to Tim Berners-Lee about WCAG 2. Check out the typography on there. Gorgeous, isn’t it? I’m not sure exactly what you’ll see, since he is using the new MS fonts for his body text and headers which not everyone has installed. I must say, they look nice (does anyone know what’s up with the smoothing on those? That’s new – is it a MS thing or are all fonts able to handle that now? I actually think they’re a little too smooth).
Here’s a screenshot for those of you who don’t have Cambria and Calibri installed (I can’t get the names of those two straight!). Check out his typography stylesheet too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an interesting set of font specifications in a stylesheet before. So many elements are very specifically defined, with many more options than what designers normally include. He’s also got a very different set of fonts listed for various elements. His main body font list is Cambria, “Hoefler Text”, Baskerville, “Palatino Linotype”, Garamond, “Lucida Fax”, Georgia, “Book Antiqua”, serif. Hmmmm…. interesting.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look quite as good on my Linux computer where the first available font is Georgia. It still looks nice though – classic typographic principles at work.
His header also works perfectly with the rest of the design even though it is using different typefaces. Brilliant! (although I do think the home page has a few problems…)
Anyway, I don’t necessarily think that typography is the most important thing, but it can really make (or break) a design, as we see here. Do you know of any other examples of outstanding web typography?
Calvin Allen February 19th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
I have to agree with you, the font does seem incredibily smooth.
Also, that picture was so bright, it hurt my eyes
Adam H February 20th, 2007 at 9:45 am
I’ve really been enjoying the resurgence of serif lately. Specifically The New York Times redesign. I also ran into Grow Collective via an article I dug up at Ma.gnolia which has a beautiful design.
Joe Clark February 20th, 2007 at 10:05 am
The homepage is the best that my friends and I could put together. (I assume you refer to joeclark.org.) And we were pioneers in the prose navigation style that Zeldman is now getting props for.
BTW, the Windows Vista fonts have been in my CSS for a year and a half. Yes, really.
You checked blog.fawny.org ?
Megan February 20th, 2007 at 11:28 am
That’s a nice use of script on the blog! Who ever uses script in normal text (besides you!)? Most of us abandoned that option long ago but not for good reason, it appears. I think that’s probably a habit leftover from the days of font tags and Windows 98 era font options.
I am going to have to go looking for some sort of reference on which fonts are availble on different operating systems. A lot of people have been waiting for the ability to specify any font but if you do your research you can get good results just by specifying a lot of possible options.
Adam H February 20th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Zeldman and the happy cog team don’t seem to be saying exactly where that idea came from. On Jason Santa Maria’s blog a reader comments about the navigation idea coming from megnut which Jason and another denies.
It is impossible these days for a team to fully disclose all the sites that went into the thought process for designing a new site. We all look at thousands of sites a week that each in their own way make a slight impression on us. And the Internet has made us all lazy so it is easier to cite the most prevalent as the origin instead of doing actual research on the history of something. Unfortunately I’m too lazy to look up an example of this.
Jason Santa Maria February 21st, 2007 at 6:48 am
Full disclosure: The sentence navigation idea came up when Z and I were brainstorming. He thought it would be cool, and I agreed. Later he came across Megnut and Beanology, and wondered if if we should abandon the idea. But, we both agreed that we could do it more clearly and concisely. Even though other people are doing similar things, the bulk of the internet is doing a similar thing in “standard” navigation. It seemed like the road less travelled would be an interesting thing to try on our site. We know full well the idea wasn’t ours first, and we never claimed it was, but we did devise the idea and how it applies to our site on our own. Hope that helps clarify things
Megan February 21st, 2007 at 8:51 am
And there’s no reason why multiple people couldn’t have had the same idea completely independently either.
I like the way Joe did that better than Happy Cog’s. His makes more sense since he’s got so many links on diverse topics to show. Happy Cog’s seems sort of self-indulgent to me but that more because of they way they wrote it (about them not what they can do for the client). And it doesn’t work when you don’t read every word. Joe’s does.
Edit: this was posted before Jason’s comment was released from the moderation queue. So it was a reply to Adam’s post, not Jason’s
I would not have responded this way to someone actually involved with the design!
Pär December 18th, 2007 at 4:33 am
Sorry, but the text in the screenshot that uses Calibri is almost unreadable for me… The letters almost seem broken. The one that uses Georgia is much-much easier to read.