Header text gets all the love, doesn’t it? From Photoshop to the browser window, the focus seems to be on design elements like logos, navigation, and of course, header type. It’s great fun to use tools like Typekit to make your header text something a little less than ordinary. It defines your site, gives you a unique look and feel, and gives readers that oh-so-scannable sensation they know and love. When you really think about it, however, readers aren’t there for the header text. The headers serve as an essential tool to quickly find what you’re looking for, but the real prize here is the body text, isn’t it? This is where your information is, this is where you write and communicate to readers, and this is an area of design that cannot be neglected. Sadly, it often is. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Text’
Designing Body Type
Thursday, July 15th, 2010Input Prompt Text: A Better Way
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010It’s a very cool feature to have a form field that has prompt text such as Enter search keywords… right inside the input box, itself. It looks good, it makes sense to users, and it can save a lot of real estate in your design by negating the need for field labels. The problem, however, is that there are about one hundred ways to implement prompt text, and ninety-nine of them are wrong. Let’s look at this thing from all angles and come up with a fantastically simple and reliable way to make this work. (more…)
Image Buttons and Accessibility
Thursday, November 19th, 2009Image buttons are a fairly common occurrence in web media. As with everything else in web design, you have a dizzying arsenal of methods from which you can choose to create this type of design element, and choosing the right method can greatly aid in your design’s accessibility, performance, and SEO-friendliness. (more…)
CSS in Print Media
Monday, February 23rd, 2009Most of the time, web designers will optimize a site to display on screen media (any type of screen, such as a computer monitor or a mobile device screen). If your site has a lot of information that could potentially be printed out by your visitors, you should consider adding print-specific CSS to your design in order to make your print media visitors happy. Depending on your design itself, the visitor’s printer, and the visitor’s web browser, you can get a number of different results when printing a given page from the internet. Here are a few quick and simple steps you can take to make your site display just as well on paper as it does on the screen. (more…)
CSS Font-Size: em vs. px vs. pt vs. percent
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008One of the most confusing aspects of CSS styling is the application of the font-size attribute for text scaling. In CSS, you’re given four different units by which you can measure the size of text as it’s displayed in the web browser. Which of these four units is best suited for the web? It’s a question that’s spawned a diverse variety of debate and criticism. Finding a definitive answer can be difficult, most likely because the question, itself, is so difficult to answer. (more…)