Factors on which the success of your Responsive Web Typography is contingent upon

With Responsive being the talk of the town we will dig deeper into the know-hows of presenting the content in such a design. Responsive web design does not means to focus on images, columns, icons and grids. Wherein, these all things makes no sense without a good depiction of content.

Web typography being the scientific name of content style is what we are going to discuss in this article. With responsive being the current trend in the tech world missing out responsive typography is a sheer ignorance of any web developer and designer.

Important terms

Typeface

Typeface is also known as the font family. It comprises of design characters which also includes letters, symbols, numbers, weight and special characters.

Font

This computer comprises of the information on usage of lettering, for instance weight, typeface, width, style and many more.

Baseline

The line from where the descenders extend and the letters rest is called as the Baseline

Cap Height

Height of the capital letters above the baseline is called the Cap Height.

X-height

The distance from the baseline to the midline is known as X-height also called as corpus size.

Descenders

The part of the alphabet which extends after the baseline is called as the descender.

Points to Consider on Web Typography

Being a web designer your aim is not just to make a responsive web typography, but to giver an eye soothing user experience to the users. Thus, sentences and words have a meaning and each alphabet has an emotion.

All your efforts of designing a website will end up in vain, if you fail to deliver the message you want to communicate to the users. In order to provide the best you need to enhance the following four basic elements of web typography.

• Image
• Color
• Type
• Texture

Working on these factors will certainly give you good results but Type will add on more to the quality of the message you will deliver.

Prime importance: Making the text readable Following are the 5 major factors that can help you to enhance your web typography.

1. Check the suitability of the typeface

Arial and Helvetica are the most popular and commonly used typefaces in the web designing world. However, the major focus should be to align the typrface with the message you want to deliver.

For instance, if you are designing for a children’s narratives it is advised to use typefaces such
Serifed Bembo Infant and Plantin Infant and Gill Infant in the header text. This is just to ensure that your typography fits well to the mindset of the target audience and not to just make the text readable.

2. Use the Web fonts

Earlier the web fonts weren’t supported by all the browsers but now web fonts are supported by all the modern browsers by using the standard link tag and @import command. You can do this by using the URLs mentioned below.

The standard link tag – <link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

The @import tag – @import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans);

3. Colors affects perception

Coming out with an eye soothing color scheme is one of the most difficult issues while designing a web site. Giving color combinations which do not go with the theme is where the designers go wrong. While designing we need to remember that there are two crucial parameters on which the success of the site is contingent upon: good functionalities and good web design.

Now when it comes to design, hues play an important role in defining how good looking your website is. So, do not just throw any color scheme which do not gels well with your font color and also with your website’s background. Doing so is considered as a blunder mistakes in web typography as this results in making your text unreadable and inflicts pain while reading.

As there is no definition for aesthetics, so there are no specific combinations for choosing an apt color scheme. However, there are some guideline which one can look up to so as to get some idea.

As per W3C, while choosing text and background colors use contrasting or distinct colors. Colors with a different hue number but same value can also be chosen as this combination can be easily read by people possessing a good eyesight but not by people with color defects. Further, do check the contrast between the two colors before using it in your website.

Try to make use of flat UI colors as they are more soothing to eyes.

4. Snub images use text

Images are a major factor for making your web page slower but we cannot neglect the fact that images are used in order to display your text exactly as you wish. However, this doesn’t works with the responsive web design as now the display depends on the device which the user is using. So, you need to use text instead of images, as the search engine also reads text but not the images.

5. Make sure not to do the text clipping

Designer use the techniche of clipping text on images in order to give a textured look to the text. Though this is a very good techniche but it is not supported by all the browsers.

In order to incorporate this you can make use of plugins such CSS Browser Selector Plugin by Paul Irish’s . Further, this light weight plugin has the capability of detecting the browser and thus accordingly adjusts the styles as per the specific browser.

You need to link the plugin to the head section after downloading it:

<script src="css_browser_selector.js" type="text/javascript"> </script>

You also need to set CSS attributes with each browser code that you want to be changed more specifically on the stylesheet.

.opera #header { margin: 20px; }
.ff3 #header {margin: 15px; }
.ie #header{ margin: 10px; }
.webkit #header { margin: 30px; }

Responsive web design is also under continual change and thus with growing standards it’s working methodology is also. We will keep on coming with new tips on how to enhance the user experience.
For any queries feel free to drop your comments!