Rich, Strong Typography
Typography has played a major role in Web design for years now. Bold,
strong, heavy headlines can effectively convey the purpose of an e-
commerce website or portfolio, while more subtle headings help structure
content and improve legibility. Obviously, the big change we’re seeing
today is richer, more versatile typography, partly made possible by the
@font-face attribute and the emergence of font-embedding services
such as TypeKit. Rich typographic elements can now be selected and copied
from the browser, which wasn’t that easy a couple of years ago.
The future is big, bold and typographic. Rich font families will be used not
only for headlines but for body copy as well, bringing typographic practices
from print over to the Web. Also, designers will experiment more with rich,
sophisticated serif fonts and bold, imposing slab fonts, supported by subtle
imagery. Web designers are also adding more depth to typography with
the text-shadow attribute in CSS3. Naturally, such subtleties are closely
tied to the choice of layout. These typographic designs are often grid-
based and borrow techniques from print design, such as sidenotes and
footnotes.
We’ve further noticed that designers are extending their font stacks, adding
increasingly more fall-back fonts in case a specified font is not available.
That’s fine, as long as the aspect ratios (or weights) of the fonts are not too
different; some screen fonts will appear wider or taller than other fonts and
hence have a larger aspect ratio, which means that some users would see
your pages at a much smaller font size than others would.