Web design is 95% typography and 100% content. I can't tell you how many times we have to design without knowing the actual CONTENT or text and we're forced to dropping Lorum Ipsum (fake text) in the designs. Not knowing the text stops us from knowing the USER, the target audience, and the entire REASON for the website. Actually knowing the subject, content and text makes the difference between 'nice' and 'functional'.
Honestly though, I think we need to take more responsibility in helping shape that copy. I've also had pretty bad experiences when the client had a dedicated writer assigned. My favorite approach is to, whenever copy is missing, go to a competitors site or Wikipedia, and copy/paste. At least you get an approximation, and it helps everybody who looks at the project start responding to and thinking about content. As UXers/designers/developers we might actually have a very good feel for content and are in a great position to get the process started.
An interface with Lorem Ipsum is like a portrait of a person without pupils drawn. It becomes abstract and all live is missing.
I think this speaks (good) volumes about you and your approach - without all the details you take the initiative.
As someone currently using 99designs (booo!hiss!) to get a website relaunch off the ground. There are one or two designers who have actually, well, read the brief, who engage and listen to feedback intelligently. I will want to work with them again in different areas, and am happy to see they have got some portfolio beginning.
Its the difference between asking permission and asking forgiveness.
On the opposite end of this, no amount of organizing for the impending content by creating fake but ideal character counts (something I've done on nearly every site I've worked on) has led to those constraints actually being followed by the internal staff or external clients I've worked with. This is easily one of the biggest after-the-fact issues/time consumers I deal with in dev because often times, the content isn't finalized even after launch. At the end of the day my experience has been that the content provider would rather the layout be changed to accomodate their copy rather than them going back in and removing a few words they feel are vital/more appropriate for the messaging. Obviously YMMV, but be sure to calculate the effort vs. your understanding of how the business makes decisions or you may be in for some heartbreak.
This is in situations where there isn't the time nor the budget for A/B and it's one person's word against another, which is a much more likely scenario for any website plucked at random.
If it's a website that makes money there is time and budget for a/b testing
if it does not make money how is there budget for professional designer and copywriters?
Edit
It's late, that post is more aggressive than I meant it to be and so, I apologise for snapping at you, I would like to suggest you have a look at @patio11's blog Kalzumeus if you want to be bludgeoned with AB test positivity, and bid you goodnight
But seriously, AB test your designs - in fact I might suggest that designers who offer a design-and-test service would make more cash and more leverage in negotiations than
not
I don't know where our disconnect is here, sorry. I'm not saying anything remotely negative about A/B. I'm saying that despite business owners understanding the potential, other things get in the way (other projects, time constraints, etc). For many people, their website isn't their primary means of revenue and their designers' and copywriters' time is best spent on the part of the business where shareholders have proven results of their effectiveness and value-add.
That's absolutely true, but hand on heart, how many Web Designers/Developers here really have a say on when they receive content? The chance to build a design around the content would be a fine thing for many of us.
Yeah, most of them think of their website as a online brochure. Unfortunately that's also how most (print)designers think. They've been doing the Lorum Ipsum Dance for years and years.
I've repeatedly had the pleasure of receiving content on the very day of the launch. And yes, it often involves tweaking the stylesheet, or something similar.
That's a common occurrence for myself and many of the designers I work with. Regarding content, we are at the client's mercy, and unfortunately I find their sense of urgency is often nearly non-existent.
I thoroughly agree. Its astonishing the number of times I've had projects stumble, sometimes collapse, at the "writing the content" stage. And only ONCE have I had someone hand me (nearly) complete copy before I started designing.
Once in complete exasperation at the total absense of copy from a client I offered to write it for them for a modest extra fee, and then rang their phone number (one of the few pieces of text I did have) and interviewed one of their call center staff to get the down low on the business.
in my 10 year experience working as a developer at web design companies the prettiest the layout the designer came up with the less functional it is in practice.
...and lets not get started on what happens once the end users start adding content... I feel like crying!
Very true, I've seen plenty of people waste hours debating how to tweak layout in fairly minor ways to increase conversions when in fact their entire content either doesn't make sense, is incomplete or is just plain boring.
I get this quite often (Chromium/Ubuntu here, too). It usually fixes itself by zooming out/zooming in. I always surf with 120% zoom, and I've kind of assumed the bug is related to that. Do you surf with a non-default zoom level?
Me too (Ubuntu + Chromium), and is really annoying, as more and more sites are starting to use webfonts :( The strange thing is that only happens around links and on Chromiun (Chrome works ok)
I think the bug was maybe fixed (I haven't seen it in a while), but Ubuntu ships an ancient version of Chrome (looks like Chrome 18, while I'm using Chrome 23).
For many technical reason, typography on the web is hard. I had written my though about it here (there are images, this is why I simply don't copy/paste):
Nice piece! Love it when someone cares about ligatures! I've actually had clients --big ones-- force me to remove "those crazy letters" in their layout. I couldn't educate them...
Hve you seen http://beta.typecastapp.com/ "Better web type without the hassle" If anyone is going to fix ligatures it's them.
This used to happen to me all the time on all sorts of pages. I haven't noticed it since upgrading to 12.04 so perhaps it has been fixed.
I did find the bug report for it at one point and a workaround is to right-click and open the web inspector. For some reason this forces a re-render that fixes the problem.
"Choosing a typeface is not typography"
I really appreciated this point.
Too often people confuse knowledge of fonts with typographic knowledge or skill. Understanding how to set type is far more important; correctly choosing a good measure (line length), margins, leading (line-spacing), and a meaningful hierarchy of font sizes (among other things) all have a huge effect on readability.
For anyone interested in learning more about typesetting, I recommend "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst.
Yes, and it will radically change as the web stops being English / Latin alphabet dominated.
Typography for Japanese characters is fascinating - three different languages almost, sitting in the same sentence, the cadence of language reflecting in the angles or spacing,
the possibilities are an order of magnitude more complex than English - and an order of magnitude more rewarding.
We've stolen a tremendous number of words with out adding arabic/hebrew/cyrillic/japanese/etc characters, I don't see any reason to assume we'll start with chinese.
That website is impossible to get a quick overview on for me. Those centered lines looked like "thoughts" at first but it seems they are subheadlines? The whitespace feels all weird to me. The text is very huge and uncomfortable. The content itself is badly written (and to me, liking reading something is important. Surely the author's name is "Oliver Reichenstein" not "oliver reichenstein" as the font looks like. Rant over.
>That says it is the browser default size and that is not correct.
It is correct, just slightly misleading. The size is made to look like the browser default size taking display density into account. It is adaptive.
The 16px font, in the screenshot you send, is not "browser default size". Or, it is, but not as it was intended by browser makers. See, when it was chosen as default, we used 14" 1024x768 monitors or worse. Anybody who wants to show this as it was intended, needs to take account the DPI of a modern screen and increase the 16px accordingly.
Trust me, those guys have gave a lot of thought into readability and font sizing.
>Such huge text is definitely not easy to read for me on any of my devices.
Actually it is. You are just not used to it. Whereas you are used to fonts of exactly the same size (or very near) when reading books. Some people have been conditioned to stare at tiny fonts (a 12-14px font is a monstrosity on a modern display) and proper type jumps at them. Check also Zeldman's reasoning:
No, the font is huge compared to a book. Yes, I did held a book infront of my face at reading distance to compare. The font here at HN is pretty much what a book is like. I use a 1680x1050 22 inch screen.
Agreed, seem full of pedantry. Moreover no typography will fix poorly written text: “what we nowadays call “information design”. So to speak, information designers nowadays do the job"... the guy did not proud read himself, most likely.
2006?, nice. So yeah these days typography is big on web design, but also obviously relative to the kind of site your building. Regarding Khoi Vinh’s Web Site, I like this page in particular http://www.subtraction.com/archives#column-b
I've been a proponent of this approach since I first read this article back in 2006, but I think it can be generalised.
The main case to be made is for a methodology of "content out", which is to design the primary content areas of your site before your worry about things like sidebars, global navigation and other decoration. In the case of text-heavy websites such as blogs and news, this means to start with typography - when the content is the writing, the typography is the design.
If you're making a video website, your first step should be to make a great video player, then presumably video description, comments, related videos and finally site-wide design. If you're making a to-do list, make the list look great before you do anything else.
Am I alone in finding the fi ligature generally annoying/difficult to read in general? I see it in print occasionally and it always feels like a kerning mistake that is hurting my ability to quickly parse the letters.
I am no web designer, but I have made plenty of websites in my time. Right now I am rebuilding a site for a product that I sell. I decided to go with a one page web site with lots of javascript for clicking around and animated images. The words on my page that are typed out are: Available At, Contact Us, and F.A.Q. . . . the other content is my logo etc. While I do see that good typography can equate to good web design, I will also add that good images, code, colors, and usefulness also help.
What exactly makes Khoi Vinh's website[1] notable? Not trying to be negative; I'm genuinely curious. I wouldn't have given it a second thought if I came across it in the wild. To my (untrained) eye, it's typography consists of a single font that is almost always too small to be readable.
6 years ago or so, when I first came across his website, it appeared as a revelation. His use of typography was very advanced at the time. I agree it looks rather ordinary and a tad busy compared to today's standard.
I'd say it depends on the website. If it only needs to present written content it CAN (not must) be. But other way I agree with you, typography is not really "functional", and a website needs to be functional. Most of the websites do.
Typography is a primary user interface element of Microsoft's Metro paradigm. Typographic elements can more readily be culturally localized using standard tools. It is harder to do this with skuomorphic icons.
well maybe, but then one should make a distinction between web application, and just plain websites. designing one may be 95% typography, but the other is about much, much more.
