www.type - effective typographic design for the world wide web Book

Most information on the Web is text and HTML's limited layout features make Web typography challenging (or downright infuriating) for designers used to the power and control of desktop publishing. www.type starts by showing the problems in detail, from the look of individual letters to the problems of layout, default colours and font substitution. If you've ever compressed an image and ended up with blotchy and banded colours, the tips on reducing colour depth explain what's going on, but look elsewhere for more information on what techniques to use. An explanation of the Web's colour model and colour chart are relegated to the short reference section and coverage of evolving standards like DHTML and cascading style sheets shows briefly what you can do but not how. Copious illustrations show the difference between printed text and on-screen resolution or how to break up long passages of text to make them easy to read. There's an excellent comparison of different ways of entering text into Photoshop, if you're planning to get around the problem by saving your perfect typography as an image; a picture of a hundred words is certainly worth a thousand here. This is a high-speed tour of the effects you can achieve with fancy typography and text turned into graphics. The (small print) captions describe some tools and effects but not always how to use them. Some are inspiring, but the sections on animation are downright ugly. The showcase of good and bad sites is interesting, especially the commentary on fonts and typography used; like the rest of the book it gets you thinking about design but doesn't tell you how to do it. --Penny JanniferRead More