It’s good to talk about typography. The last few weeks have been particularly good.
Mark Boulton, he of the five simple steps, writes about Gill Sans, a typeface with which he is well acquainted, working, as he does, at the BBC.
There’s no doubt about it; Gill Sans, like its predecessor Johnston Underground, is a gorgeous typeface that no amount of overuse or abuse can tarnish. In fact, one of the things I like about southern Britain, and London in particular, is the ubiquity of Gill and Johnston’s work. I find a city with a consistent typographical identity as pleasing as a unified architectural style.
The big news for web-based typography recently was the unveiling of Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. This is an ongoing project of Richard’s which, I think, is superbly researched and tremendously useful:
"Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field. In order to allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web, I have structured this website to step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS."
There’s an RSS feed so you can stay notified of new additions to the project.
Did you know that Richard used to work at Multimap? Before he jumped ship for Clearleft, he made sure that his legacy of web standards, accessibility and typography was in good hands by passing the baton to Andy Hume. Now Andy has published a fantastically good article over at Sitepoint called The Anatomy of Web Fonts. Read it, enjoy it, bookmark it.