Typography and Design

Visual contrast and page design
Good typography depends on the visual contrast between one font and another, and the contrast between text blocks and the surrounding empty space. Nothing attracts the eye and brain of the viewer like strong contrast and distinctive patterns, and you only get those attributes by carefully designing them into your pages. If you make everything bold, then nothing stands out and you end up looking as if you are SHOUTING at your readers. If you cram every page with dense text, readers see a wall of gray and their brains will instinctively reject the lack of visual contrast. Just making things uniformly bigger doesn't help at all. Even boldface fonts become monotonous very quickly, because if everything is bold then nothing stands out "boldly."

Use the major HTML headings sparingly. One alternative to overly bold HTML headers is to use the physical style controls of HTML to make text bold or italic without increasing the font size. However, you should understand that there are some disadvantages to using physical styles to control the typography of your Web pages. The HTML heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) are designed to identify important titles and subtitles in your text, and are only incidentally meant to change the visual display of the titles. If you use the "FONT SIZE" tags in Netscape and use physical styles like "BOLD" then automatic indexing and text analysis programs will have a difficult time analyzing your web documents.

Visual logic versus structural logic
The framers of the original HTML standards were physical scientists who wanted a standard means to share documents with minimal markups aimed at revealing the logical structure of the information. Since they had little interest in the exact visual form of the document, no precise typography and page formatting is possible in current implementations of HTML. In focusing solely on the structural logic of the HTML document, the framers of the Web ignored the need for the visual logic of sophisticated graphic design and typography.

The standards organization responsible for codifying the HTML language is responding the widespread complaints of graphic designers that the heading tags in Web documents often produce clunky, over-large titles and subtitles. Through style sheets and new font control tags future versions of HTML will soon allow you to specify what size font each header level will produce in each Web page. Thus you will be able to produce more sophisticated typography without giving up the substantial advantages of using the conventional HTML header tags.

Type and legibility
We read primarily by recognizing the overall shape of words, not by parsing each letter and then assembling a recognizable word:

Avoid all-uppercase headlines they are much harder to read, because words formed with capital letters are monotonous rectangles that offer few distinctive shapes to catch the reader's eye:

Legibility depends on the tops of words
Your choice of uppercase or lowercase letters can have a dramatic effect on legibility. In general, use down style (capitalize only the first word, and any proper nouns) for your headlines and subheads. Down style headlines are more legible, because we primarily scan the tops of words as we read:

Notice how much harder it is to read the bottom half of the same sentence:

If you use initial capital letters in your headlines you disrupt the reader's scanning of the word forms:

Pattern and page design
When your content is mostly text, typography is the tool you use to "paint" patterns of organization on the page. The first thing your reader sees is not the title or other details of the page, but the overall pattern and contrast of the page. The reader's eye scans the page first as a purely graphic pattern, then begins to track and decode type and page elements. The regular, repeating patterns established through carefully organized pages of text and graphics help the reader to quickly establish the location and organization of your information, and increase the overall legibility of your pages. Patchy, heterogeneous typography and text headers makes it difficult for the user to see major patterns quickly, and makes it almost impossible to for the user to quickly predict where information is likely to be in located in unfamiliar documents:

Settle on as few heading styles and subtitles as are necessary to organize your content, then use your chosen styles consistently. The fact that HTML provides six levels of headings doesn't mean that you should ever use six levels of headings in a single page. This whole manual of over 60 Web pages uses only two headers; an H2-level page title, and boldface subtitles.

Manipulating text blocks
Text on the computer screen is hard to read because of the low resolution of today's computer screens, but also because the layout of most Web pages violates one of the most basic rules in book and magazine typography: the lines of text in most Web pages are much too long to be easily read. Magazine and book columns are narrow for physiologic reasons: at normal reading distances the eye's span of movement is only about 8 cm (3 inches) wide, so designers try to keep dense passages of text in columns no wider than reader's comfortable eye span. Wider lines of text require the readers to move their heads slightly, or strain their eye muscles to track over the long lines of text. Unfortunately most Web pages are almost twice as wide as the viewer's eye span, so extra effort is required to scan through those long lines of text. If you want to encourage your Web site users to actually read a document online (as opposed to printing it out for later reading), consider using the "BLOCKQUOTE" or "PRE" HTML tags to shorten the line length of text blocks to about half the normal width of the Web page.

The pages in this manual are laid out using an invisible 2-column table (BORDER="0") to restrict the text line length to about 40 to 60 characters per line. The exact character count is difficult to predict because of the way different browser software and different operating systems display type sizes. In conventional print layout columns of 30 to 40 characters per line are considered ideal, but this seems too sparse to our eyes for Web page layout.