Okay, so I was searching around this morning through some of my regular websites and came across a very interesting article that got me really thinking about typography on the web. A common problem I have is writing CSS and designing the type as I’d like it to be presented on the screen to the viewer. So you can imagine how insane of a task it might be for type designer who is actually crafting the fonts. There is a big difference between designing typefaces for print and the web; pixels behave differently than blobs of ink on paper. Typefaces for the Web need different qualities. “The bigger problem is all of the technology that delivers the font to the viewer. The website is delivered by one cluster of hardware to another, often with a different operating system, different browser and, in some cases, different pieces of software. That’s a very long chain. The number of variations is almost bottomless, and the results are unreliable at best.”

Imagine that you are a super-successful movie director, who’s been given hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of whiz-bang technology to make a cinematic epic. Sounds good? Not once you are told that people will have to watch it on fuzzy old black and white television sets.

The new publishing world of pixels presents striking complications to displaying fonts on the Web, according to a recent New York Times article. Browsers grow; eyes get strained; fonts become unclear and unappealing. As the Web world has evolved, typographers have worked to develop new tricks to fashion fonts for computer screens while preserving the craft’s rich history and nuance. For instance, if typographers “make enclosed spaces, like those in an ‘a’ and ‘e,’ bigger than they need to be in print.”

Props
Reference: All Top
Article: New York Times
Photo Credit: Fotolia