Better Web Type

I’ve really enjoyed reading this book so far. It’s one of those books that you can read from cover to cover over a weekend and come into work on the Monday a typography expert…. or you can use it as a reference on your desk for whenever you run into a design or development problem when it comes to typography.

I’m using it for the latter while I work through improving the typography on the A Briefer History of Time site and I hope to launch that soon with more of an update on the book itself soon.

For now though, here are some excerpts from the site and I highly recommend you pick yourself up a copy.

Excerpts from the book’s site

The book explains the content-first approach as an alternative to the mobile-first. With the content as its backbone, it then proceeds to design and build a fully working example website with a layout that challenges the web of today.

See how your newly acquired knowledge gets applied to a realistic example.

Unlike the free course counterpart, the book is rich with code snippets and Sketch examples. The course was limited to a certain number of words and images, the book was written with no such limits in mind.

The course was 13,000 words of content, the book is now 40,000 words, so 3 times more.

Find out what’s wrong with using faux font styles, using print instead of web fonts and confusing text and display fonts. Learn about these mistakes and how to avoid them.

The book also debunks myths like legibility of serif vs sans-serif typefaces and “sans-serif typefaces are better for the web”.

Find answers to the following questions:

• Should I set a modular scale first and then apply the grid or the other way around?
• Do the line-height and the margins need to be a value from the modular scale?
• What do I do when a size from the modular scale doesn’t fit into the grid?