Whether it is for graphic design or web design, or any other medium that contains visual elements; typography is one of the top critical subjects that comes with a few important rules.
These rules are global. But for web design, it slightly differs from other mediums.
I Would Like to Remind You One Thing:
Design is essential, but when it comes to design for the web; the immortal motto is the same: “Content is king”.
Web design relating to the information design gets us to this point. People use the web for one main purpose: Information.
And since we still have a limited amount of font faces available for browser styles, we always have to consider users’ reading preferences.
Remember the “comic sans” era that dominated the amateur sites’ text type and banned with a huge word of mouth? There was a reason for it.
Type on the web need to be both aesthetic and easy to read. If you maximize the aesthetic level, you will loose readability. If you maximize readability, you may not have a design at all.
If you just noticed the slight change on my single blog page font, you will see what I mean.
The font you used to see in my blog detail page was the same with the <body> font, Lucida Sans Unicode.
Which I think helped the whole concept of Monofactor stay intact, but maybe a little less readable on the long text parts.
So I changed the font to Helvetica, Arial on single blog pages.
This change I believe made the blog entry text even more readable.
In fact, my statistics show that the bounce rate went down and time on site has increased since the font change on the entries.
Like I said, typography matters =)
Tags: typography, web design