Typography

With the `progress()` function in CSS we’ve got a new way to calculate the size for type based on the viewport without problems of the past.

Josh Tumath: Have you ever noticed that when you increase the system text size in your iOS or Android phone’s accessibility settings, the text gets bigger everywhere except on the web? On Safari and Chrome, it makes absolutely no difference. New thing: <meta name=text-scale>  This isn’t page zoom, which scales everything, it’s just respects the […]

When you’re doing a design prototype, it’s common to use the actual fonts the design will use, but use “lorem ipsum” text. The idea being to not distract anyone with real words when they are supposed to be looking at the design. Or you just don’t have any real text to work with at that […]

I know that you can “chain” the CSS property filter, like: All three of those filters will apply. But somehow I never thought about applying the same filter more than once. That also works, and they don’t override each other, they “stack” (or whatever you want to call it). So here’s some useless bar trivia […]

If you’re designing something for kids, you’ve always got Comic Sans as a typeface choice. We make fun of it, but it really is playful and nice and quite readable. It’s not nearly this egregious. I’m sure you can find other good options out there too, but big high fives to the gang at Underware […]

text-wrap: balanced; dropped first but text-wrap: pretty; wasn’t too far behind and they are both useful. The pretty value is now coming to Safari and Jen Simmons calls it “an unprecedented level of polish to typography on the web.” If you’ve already seen pretty and think of it as the thing that prevents short last […]

Being able to control the `paint-order` in CSS means you can push the stroke behind the fill, fixing awkward issues with ruining letterform readability.

Blue links with underlines is a good default style for links in body text, but it’s a bit intense. Maybe we can chill it out a bit and be a bit more flexible.

There are 155,063 Unicode characters. A lot of that is stuff from other languages, but there is still a large amount of randomly useful characters like arrows and symbols and whatnot. There are so many that even if you find good lists, it’s hard to search and sort. I like Benjamin Milde’s idea, shapecatcher, that […]

Kerning type is moving individual letters such that the space between them feels right. It’s not something you have to be terribly concerned about with web type generally, but it’s still a good design skill to have for working on type that is quite large or long-lasting like a physical sign, logo, giant headline, etc. […]