On Web Typography

Which elements are most important? What relationships do elements share?

Without contrast, we don’t have hierarchy, and without hierarchy, the typography feels indistinguishable and our readers are left without a map.

A grid does not dictate where elements go; it merely serves as a collection of possibilities (FIG 6.2).

The most important things don’t always have to be the largest; they just need to be more distinguished than other elements. In other words, they need more contrast.

Headlines are the attention grabbers.

When in doubt, a good rule of thumb is to pair a serif and a sans serif.

To keep the system you’ve created for visual communication properly balanced, you need to choose typefaces that don’t compete too much with each other, but aren’t so similar as to be indistinguishable.

Find two typefaces that share similar shapes, like Helvetica and Bodoni, and pair them together. Then they can play off of each other. Their shared skeletons form a visual union, but their contrasting letterforms spark healthy dissonance (FIG 4.20).

It also helps our readers easily scan chunks of information and understand what they’re looking at.

Because when a reader notices the type, they’re taken out of the act of reading and are instead trying to decode why something else is calling attention to itself.