Book Image

Practical Responsive Typography

By : Calonaci
Book Image

Practical Responsive Typography

By: Calonaci

Overview of this book

Typography is an essential part of any website’s design. It can help you stand out from the crowd, communicate with clarity, and cultivate a distinctive identity. Practical Responsive Typography demonstrates how to use typography to greatest effect. With this book you won't underestimate it's importance - you'll be in complete control over this crucial component of web design. From scaling and optimizing screen spaces to using a range of different web fonts, you'll quickly get up to speed with the practical considerations behind successful typography. But more than the fundamentals, you'll also find out how to go further by customizing typography designs to suit your identity.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Sans Serifs

They are named so due to the loss of the decorative serifs, in French "sans" stands for "without". Sans Serif is a more recent invention, since it was born in the late 18th century.

They are divided into the following four sub-families:

Grotesque Sans

It is the earliest of the bunch; its appearance is similar to the serif with contrasted strokes but without serifs and with angled terminals

Franklin Gothic is one of the most famous typefaces in this family.

Grotesque Sans

Neo-Grotesque Sans

It is plain looking with little to no contrast, small apertures, and horizontal terminals. They are one of the most common font styles ranging from Arial and Helvetica to Universe.

Neo-Grotesque Sans

Humanist font

They have a friendly tone due to the calligraphic style with a mixture of different widths characters and, most of the times, contrasted strokes.

Gill Sans being the flag-carrier.

Humanist font

Geometric font

Based on the geometric and rigorous shapes, they are more modern and are used less for body copy. They have a general simplicity but readability of their characters is difficult.

Futura is certainly the most famous geometric font.

Geometric font

Script typefaces

They are usually classified into two sub-families based upon the handwriting, with cursive aspect and connected letterforms. They are as follows:

  • Formal script
  • Casual script
  • Monospaced typefaces
  • Display typefaces

Formal script

They are reminiscent of the handwritten letterforms common in the 17th and 18th centuries, sometimes they are also based on handwritings of famous people.

They are commonly used for elevated and highly elegant designs and are certainly unusable for long body copy.

Kunstler Script is a relatively recent formal script.

Formal script

Casual script

This is less precise and tends to resemble a more modern and fast handwriting. They are as recent as the mid-twentieth century.

Mistral is certainly the most famous casual script.

Casual script

Monospaced typefaces

Almost all the aforementioned families are proportional in their style, (each character takes up space that is proportional to its width). This sub-family addresses each character width as the same, with narrower ones, such as i, just gain white space around them, sometimes resulting in weird appearances. Hence, Due to their nature and their spacing, they aren't advised as copy typefaces, since their mono spacing can bring unwanted visual imbalance to the text.

Courier is certainly the most known monospaced typeface.

Monospaced typefaces

Display typefaces

They are the broadest category and are aimed at small copy to draw attention and rarely follow rules, spreading from every one of the preceding families and expressing every mood.

Note

Recently even Blackletters (the very first fonts designed with the very first, physical printing machines) are being named under this category.

For example, Danube and Val are just two of the multitude that are out there:

Display typefaces