From my interview with Shaun Slattery in Screen Space 16, Shaun suggests we should be aware of typical locations for digital items and put them where people (including ourselves) expect them. People pay a lot of attention to where things are. We have habits of putting things in certain places and looking for things in […]
Verdana is a great typeface for screen use, and it works especially well in small sizes and on small screens. Verdana was actually designed to be highly readable and legible on computer screens. In fact, as it was particularly designed to have high readability is small sizes, it is a wise choice for any screen […]
Like its younger sister typeface Georgia, Verdana was designed by award-winning type designer Matthew Carter. Carter created Verdana for “maximum readability at small sizes on the screen” according to Virginia Howlett (the “mother of Verdana” who spearheaded the project to develop Verdana). The sans serif typeface was made readable at smaller screen sizes with high […]
As I say in the Typeface of the week discussion on Arial, Microsoft added Arial in 1992 to their operating system and since the typeface has been used as a default sans serif. As such, it has the same overuse problems as Times New Roman. In addition, many typographers or typography lovers see Arial as […]
Bulleted lists are a digital media writer’s dream. They can: present information effectively emphasize points draw the reader’s attention highlight information aid in skimming and scanning provide a nice visual break and white space show hierarchy and sequence connect items But don’t just randomly use bullets. Use them for lists. Use number lists when order […]
Make sure your homepage communicates what it needs to in 30 seconds. Users spend about 30 seconds on a homepage the first time they visit a site. So, say what you have to say quickly. Make the site and the purpose of the site clear. Provide information quickly on what makes your site/company better, different, […]
Georgia was designed by award-winning type designer Matthew Carter. Carter created Georgia as a screen typeface, and it is quite readable on screen with high x-heights and wider characters. Georgia was designed to go with one of Carter’s earlier screen typeface, Verdana, a sans serif typeface. Carter created Verdana and Georgia for Microsoft, and Georgia […]
White space doesn’t have to be white, but it should be a key component of your web design. White space is the empty or negative space on your page—whether it be a web page, print page, or blog post. White space makes designs cleaner, more professional, and often more luxurious. White space can add emphasis […]
The alt attribute (often incorrectly identified as the “alt tag”) is the small bit of identifying text given to images in web design. You can see this alt text when you roll over the image with your cursor or it replaces the image if the image does not load (either due to a coding problem […]
Arial is a child of the licensing restriction “wars” of the 1980s. Adobe had the very popular Helvetica under a Type-1 format and were not sharing at the level others wanted. So, Arial was created by Monotype (a font foundry) as an alternative and easy substitute because it was the same width as Helvetica[1]. Visually, […]
The Blog Feed The Podcast Feed