8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs

I wrote this article for Smashing Magazine and it was published last Friday on their site. I’m re-publishing it here for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.

Many people, designers included, think that typography consists of only selecting a typeface, choosing a font size and whether it should be regular or bold. For most people it ends there. But there is much more to achieving good typography and it’s in the details that designers often neglect.

These details give the designer total control, allowing them to create beautiful and consistent typography in their designs. While these details can be applied across different types of media, in this articles we’re going to focus on how to apply them to web design using CSS. Here are 8 simple ways you can use CSS to improve your typography and hence the overall usability of your designs. Continue reading “8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs”

NetNewsWire Style 2.5

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Version 2.5 of my NetNewsWire style is now available. The design is simple and clean with a great deal of focus on typography and legibility. In this new version I’ve made some improvements that will enhance the reading experience.

Another enhancement that I was hoping to implement was a consistent vertical baseline. But because of inconsistencies within RSS feeds it was very difficult to accomplish, probably even impossible. For example in certain feeds blocks of copy are not wrapped in the paragraph tag, instead just use the break tag. For this reason it’s hard to control the text and elements like images.

Anyhow, I’m very exited about the features I was able to add.

New Features in Version 2.5

  • Widows
    Prevention of typographic widows in titles and body copy via jQWidon’t.

  • Capitalization
    All words in title are capitalized.

  • Image Resize
    Images wider than 600px are resized to fit the fixed width of the style.

Special thanks to Oliver Boermans for helping me with some bugs.

To install just double click the file.

Download NNW Style 2.5