Chapter 3. Where Is Typography in the Design Process?
This question is nearly as old as the written letter. Or to put it more flippantly:
Which came first, the Chicken or the âCâ, the âh,â the âi,â the other âc,â the âk,â the âe,â and the ânâ?
A popular cry recently has been for designers to design from the content outâsometimes with the variant âfrom the typography outââin order to focus on creating the best presentation of the content itself. The theory being if you have a really well-designed piece of content and build a site design framework around that, youâre always putting the most important element of the siteâthe content itselfâat the forefront of your design efforts. While the purpose of this book isnât to focus on supporting or disputing this notion (and for the record, I think thereâs much merit here), it does highlight the importance of considering type very early in your design process. You canât design âcontent firstâ without type!
Beyond aesthetics, thereâs consideration of history (does the typeface relate to a certain point in time connected with the content, or have a historical connection to the brand, as in Figure 3-1?), the amount of copy to be set (smaller amounts can be set in a more expressive font; longer passages of body copy might warrant a more âworkmanlikeâ selection), and whether that particular font is available as a web font (and how it looks on various device-and-OS combinations). Tragedy ...
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