Links: 1

This page is a compilation of links to other sites that offer advice on macro-typographic issues.

Usability

Michael Bernard's usability articles at the Wichita Software Usability Research Lab (SURL) website contain a wealth of sensible advice on how to place and arrange text. SURL's Usability News series includes a celebrated Comparison of Popular Online Fonts in issue number 41. The WebsiteTips' Usability page points to some of the best weblogs on the topic.

Typography

Joe Gillespie's Web Page Design for Designers contained a thought-provoking summary of general typographical principles from the perspective of 2000, though its advice about using <br> tags for layout indicates it was written before CSS became the dominant technology.

Cascading Style Sheets

The single best site that demonstrates what CSS can do is the CSS Zen Garden, which gives radically different looks to the same source file.

Interface Patterns

The field of Human-Computer Interface Design is more concerned with interfaces to "do" things than means to "read" text, but deals with some of the issues that face the macro-typographer. Even if you are not convinced by the "pattern language" notion, Jenifer Tidwell's uncompleted 1999 book, Common Ground: A Pattern Language for Human-Computer Interface Design, offers refreshing explanations of why we think the way we do in page layout: why we provide "optional detail on demand" (e.g. footnotes) or short descriptions (e.g. glosses), when we need a high-density information display (e.g. a pedigree) or "tiled working surfaces" (columns and boxes). Martijn van Welie's website follows up some of these ideas, though the emphasis is again on interactivity rather than readability. If you are interested in these ideas, also check out Tom Erickson's links collection.