The Best Faces for the ScreenWhen choosing a screen text, its important to take into consideration certain things. The actual size of the text, to use a serif for sans, x-height, and extra tracking.The most helpful hints I was able to take from this article is the weight of the text is important. Something that is light tends to look better because it looks simple and cleaner. Choosing a face with a larger x-height is also helpful because if give you more pixels to work with for lower case letters. It says that for the screen it’s a good idea to have an x-height that’s one pixel larger than half the body size. Also in dealing with leading, collisions between characters when the leading is too tight can cause a lot of noise and make it harder to read. Principles of Beautiful Web DesignI actually printed out all 45 pages of this first chapter. There’s a lot of useful information that I’m going to take with me and use as a reference. The first paragraph about the discovery of your design states that all designs come from how your client/company runs their business. This is the only way to come up with an appropriate and effective design. The next step is to take what you’ve learned and use it to create the design. I do this in my everyday job, and it works. As far as defining good design, the author state that there are two main standpoints which most people determine whether a web site is good or bad. Usability: functionality and effective presentation of information and efficiency. And the second of course aesthetics. A few bullet points to keep in mind:
- You want to make sure users are pleased by the design but drawn to the content.
- Users can move about easily via intuitive navigation
- users recognize each page as belonging to the site
That’s the guts of the chapter. It’s so chalked full of information, it would be like me writing another chapter to get in detail. As all the other articles/chapters we’ve read, the most important thing and the thing that is reiterated over and over again is user functionality. Makes sense. What good is a website if no one can use it?
