Blogging impact by design

As Meghan said in her recent post, we're going to be talking about some of what we have seen to be business blogging best practices and one area that I would like to explore is that of blog design.

The best graphic designers in the world are typography freaks, the idea being that you can say more with your content by choosing a typeface (they also get pissed if you call it a font), and manipulating it on your page in a way that conveys what the content might already be saying... Make sense? Basically, typographers live to make content as easy to read as possible.

There are some differences in traditional print type and web type that are important to understand (not saying I fully understand, because I don't, but hopefully these links will help us all!). Let us learn

Resolution resolved.
With cool new technologies on the horizon like font embedding, we are likely to see a whole lot more options down the road for the fonts we can utilize online, but the fact remains that some were meant for print, others for web. The reason web type to date has been limited to a handful of fonts is because most typefaces were designed for high resolution printing, to withhold their intricate detail at very large sizes. When shrunk down to a screen with a resolution of 72dpi (as opposed to 300dpi for good printing) these traditional print types are out of their element, not that they're not still awesome. Some fonts were made for computer screens specifically, and probably should refrain from wandering their way into print for that matter.

Not all computers are created equally.
We generally see a limited number of fonts online for usability's sake-- these are the fonts that generally all computers have. We know them as Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia, Courier, Lucida, to name a few. Here's a good link. http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html

Projected vs. Reflected Light.
The difference is not only the resolution, but also the type of light. Ultimately, our eyes tire much quicker with a projected (computer screen) light, whereas with print, the light is bounced off of the page and much easier on the ojos. Here's a simple article describing the difference. http://writingfortheweb.org/article/8/online-format-reflected-vs-projected-light

Here, try these.
These links will give you a good start on finding expertise to gain a good understanding of basics and much more of making type look beautiful and readable online. Go get em.

http://ilovetypography.com/2008/02/28/a-guide-to-web-typography/
http://www.typographer.org/2009/04/web-font-embedding-points-missing.html
http://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm
http://fontfeed.com/archives/category/type-tips/