Web Design is 95% Typography

I have a confession to make: I love typography. And having just read Web Design is 95% Typography, I think I love it just a little bit more:

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

Macro-typography (overall text-structure) in contrast to micro typography (detailed aspects of type and spacing) covers many aspects of what we nowadays call “information design”.

Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance.

Ampersand web typography conference: 17 June 2011, Brighton UK

The Ampersand web typography conference is taking place in Brighton on Friday 17 June 2011. Tickets £125 + VAT.

Ampersand is an affordable one-day event for knowledgable web designers & type enthusiasts, featuring:

Vincent Connare, creator of Comic Sans; David Berlow, type designer & cofounder of The Font Bureau; Tim Brown, type manager for Typekit & maker of Nice Web Type; John Daggett, Firefox developer & editor of the CSS3 Fonts Module; Mark Porter, former creative director of guardian.co.uk; Jon Tan, web designer at Analog & cofounder of Fontdeck; plus special guest.

Cambridge Usability talk Monday 11 April: “From Search to Discovery”

The next Cambridge Usability Group event will be on Monday 11 April, when Tony-Russell-Rose will give a talk entitled  From Search to Discovery:

Search user experience has come a long way from just a simple text input field. Faceted search interfaces have become standard on most e-commerce websites and search results help guide users to related and featured content. But how and why have search interfaces evolved so much in recent years?

We are delighted to welcome Tony Russell-Rose, from Endeca Technologies, to talk about how search interfaces can support users in a process of exploration and discovery.

Date: Monday 11 April 2011, Time: 18.30 for 18.45 to 20.00

Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge ( Map & address).

Registration: The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend. You can register now with Eventbrite.

Free Access to UIE’s 2010 Web App Masters Tour Show Until 14 March

UIE (User Interface Engineering) are giving free access to their Web App Masters Tour Show — just sign up with your email address before Monday 14 March.

The recordings and slide decks contain great information like dealing with complex navigation, integrating social components, moving away from static forms, and using design patterns.

You’ll hear from top web app masters like Luke Wroblewski, Hagan Rivers, Bill Scott, Stephen Anderson, and Jared Spool. And you’ll get the details on Facebook, Twitter, 37signals, and Marriott Corporation’s design process.

Google release open source web fonts

From the Google code blog:

Today we are excited to announce a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API to make them available to everybody on the web. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

What makes a good persona?

Personas are widely used in the user experience world to capture the desires, needs and behaviours of user groups. But what makes a good persona?

[Also have a look at the personas we developed for the EBI resdesign] [ - ed ]