CREATE FREE BLOG |
USING THE RIGHT TYPO FOR YOUR BLOG |
The gods of typography generally agree that serif type is more readable than sans serif when you are dealing with copious amounts of text. Possible reasons for this could be that the feet of the serif face help guide the reader's eye along, the thick and thin variations in the strokes of the font make it more readable, or maybe it's just because we're all just used to it. There are no stone tablets that proclaim exactly why this is true, but open up a bunch of novels the next time you're in a bookstore and compare how many are set in serif as opposed to sans serif type.
These same gods have also been known to lean towards sans serif in cases where short bursts of type are required to provoke a instant recognition. Some uses of sans serif towards this end would be signage, headlines.
Fonts on the screen are different than printed fonts. A screen font is a mosaic of squares that tries its best to emulate the shapes in an alphabet. Screen type composition is not as exacting as print, and it can have various outcomes depending on the user's browser choice. I have found that, on the web, going against the gods works well for me. I often use Verdana, a sans serif typeface, for the body copy of web pages and blogs. Sans serif may work well on blogs because, by nature, a blog copy is usually formed in short lines and short paragraphs—not too dissimilar from advertising copy. And although I go against the gods, I haven't yet been struck by lightening. Once I did get a nice jolt from a coffeemaker, though.
Times is the default typeface on the web. Designed in the 1930s for the Times newspaper in London, its design is based on the principles of typography, which have evolved since the Roman Empire (uppercase) and the 16th century.
When you are deciding how you want your blog type to look, it's helpful to have a general idea of how web font sizes and printed font sizes relate. In printed matter, size is straightforward, but on the web, there are various factors that influence the size of letters and words. These factors include monitor resolution (and how it's set up within an operating system), the web browser's default font size chosen by your reader, and finally, the actual size you specify for your typeface.
In the world of print, type is usually specified in points. Point size is the measurement between the bottom of the lowest descender to the top of the highest ascender, with a little bit added on. The most commonly used value for the typographic point is 1/72 of an inch. However, in print a 72-point letter is never exactly an inch high, because lines of type need to be set with additional space between them so that they don't touch.
When your word processing application asks the operating system for a particular letter at a particular point size, it is given a bitmap rendering of that letter. The size of the letter in pixels depends on the resolution of the output device. It is important to know that the type size, in pixels, for any specified point size is dependent on the resolution of the output device—this is as true for screen displays as it is for printers. Computer monitors typically range from 72 to 150 pixels per inch.
The official HTML specifications leave it to the developers of browsers to decide the relationship between the <FONT SIZE=n> values and the actual type size in points.