It’s a little Smashing Library treat, featuring some of the most mem- orable and useful articles that have been published on Smashing Maga- zine in the last few years—all of them carefully selected and thorough- ly edited. Ranging from heavily discussed topics such as responsive Web design, to ideas on UX, to trusty mainstays like nifty Photoshop tricks, to hands-on business advice and design inspiration, this eBook is a potpourri as diverse as your work as a Web designer.
[...]... Dyslexia is an impairment to a person’s ability to read For instance, a dyslexic brain sees characters as images and rotates and mirrors letters As a result, a lowercase two-story a with a weak tail might appear the same to a dyslexic person as an italic “e.” In addition, most characters in geometric typefaces are hard for people with dyslexia to read because of similarities in form and shape The mirrored... language that you are not familiar with (say, Arabic or Vietnamese), then you’ll probably need a one-on-one lesson with a local typographer But most Web designers will build user profiles for their international audience, and we have to make sure that all characters are supported and that the typeface works in languages less common than English and Spanish Each language has a particular critical combination... letters are fake italics, also referred to as slanted romans Some browsers are capable of distorting fonts into a slanted shape on the fly with CSS, but pseudo-italics are considered a typographical crime Typefaces designed by the same designer are often a smart combination, because proportions, shapes, strokes and angles will share the same DNA Note the typefaces designed by Jos Buivenga, Veronika Burian,... Typefaces33,” Dan Mayer • “How to Choose a Typeface34,” Douglas Bonneville Editorial Accessories Display and decorative typefaces are appropriate for short text snippets, such as headlines and pull quotes, because they set the tone and atmosphere and break up long copy (remember the reading-time assessment from above?) Text typefaces are utilitarian and suitable for long reading Reading can get boring after a while,... very basic, and I did not explain many details Two of them are rather important, so I’ll add them here One is about using ems for media queries, and the other is about breakpoints BREAK RANGES There has been some discussion lately about the term “breakpoints.” Mark Boulton48 and Ben Callahan think49 we should call them “opti48 http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/theinbetween 32 mization points,” and... wider than either 75 characters or 10 words, something should happen Simply said, these are your breakpoints Variables That Define The Ideal Measure Many variables define an ideal measure For instance, the German language has longer words than English, which could very well result in a wider column Yes, you read that correctly: you could have different grids based on the languages for international websites... they are best set with a variation of the primary typeface (small caps, for instance) As stated, this is more of a safe bet than a rule set in stone We Have A Responsibility Two important factors should influence your decisions First, if they don’t like your typographic choice, a reader can change it via the customization options built into the application or device And if they do that, they will usually... German uses “ß” — and those are still only within the Latin alphabet Know the characters and combinations in your target language In order to cover the extended Latin alphabet, we obviously have to choose a typeface that covers all Central European characters (i.e use paid fonts) But in cases of the aforementioned letter combinations in less common languages, it wouldn’t hurt to consider typeface candidates... best in what we read most Learn about the history of the typeface you’re considering and compare it to the usual suspects for the target audience Skolar30, a typeface by David Brezina, was designed for scholarly and multilingual publications, where people are used to seeing Times New Roman Skolar is fresh and modern, yet similar enough in features and appearance to Times New Roman to be easily adopted... there is room for an extra column, we could play with the layout of our article I added a 33%-wide column44 to the left, filled with the heading and the first paragraph of the article Other elements, such as block quotes and images, could fill this gap as well The code gets a bit more complex here And this is definitely not the only way, or the most maintainable way, to create a layout like this But this . only the next most Beautiful Typeface™ all the time, this habit alone can drive us away from the functional role of typefaces and their advantages as versatile,. Library treat, featuring some of the most mem- orable and useful articles that have been published on Smashing Maga- zine in the last few years—all of them