Typography

I want to start out first saying how much I hate having to blog. I understand the need for them, just hate writing them myself. With that said, on to typography.

I searched around and found some interesting things on typography. The first site I found was http://spyrestudios.com/blog-designs-with-killer-typography/ . It’s not a blog itself, but instead linked me to its 30 top typography blogs. This was a really nice start. Even though the blogs it linked me to were not about typography, the examples of each style were really cool.

The second site I found was http://designreviver.com/inspiration/15-inspiring-typography-based-blog-designs/ . It had a few tips about balancing you type, so that nothing overpowered the site or went unnoticed. I really liked this quote: “Good typography should not dominate a page, it should highlight certain areas as well as allowing readers to subconsciously scan the rest of the page and take in the information with ease.” This might simple like a simple comment, but its what you need to keep in mind when starting a site.

The third site I found was http://ilovetypography.com/2008/02/28/a-guide-to-web-typography/ . This was a very cool, very indepth site all about type fonts and Typography. Along with exapmles and advice, it broke balanced typography into for basic guidlines. First is contrast. Balanced contrast lets text and images stand apart and not become a jumble of clutter. Second is imply the size of your font. Balancing the size with the impotence of the content is very important. You never want body font to small to read, or headlines so big they overpower everything. Third was hierchy. This referes to a differnece in the size and font of your headlines , sub heads, and content to distinguish each. And last is Space. Try not to leave too much wasted, or empty, space as well as not overcrowding the site. This was by far the best site that I found.

Web Standards

There are as you know many different ways to accomplish the same task on a computer. The same goes for the way web sites are programed and designed. However with all this freedom came a problem, not all browsers and computers support all types of markup languages. Top programers came together to create what is known as Web Standards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_standards). Web Standards are a set of rules that decide which markup languages are used, and what tags are assigned to what commands.

W3C

The front leader in this is W3C, or World-Wide Web consortium ( http://www.w3.org/ ).  W3C is an organization dedicated to maintaining Web Standards so that all information is in the same format and accessible to everyone. The W3C is a world-wide organization led by MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) (in Sophia Antipolis, France), and Keio University (in Japan). All these people work together to offer a common computer language that offers the information to everyone.

ISO

Another lead company in Web Standards is ISO, or Internation Organization of Standardization (http://www.iso.org/iso/home.html) . ISO is a non-government organization located in Geneva, Switzerland that includes 163 countries world wide. Like W3C, ISO is dedicated to regulating HTML and similar mark-up languages to offer the full web to everyone.

Without Web standards in place, the web would be a chaotic place with no organization what so ever. This would create numerous problems between the user and the host site. Many people would be unable to access information written in a way that is incompatible with their bowser or computer, along with a number of other compatibility issues.