You may have read the title for this post and thought, "Why on earth does a developer need to know anything about typography?" I mean, there’s already a lot on your plate and you’re making hundreds of decisions a day. Should you use React or Vue? npm or Yarn? ES6 or ES7? Sadly, this often leaves something like type as an afterthought. But, let’s remember that web design is 95% typography:
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.
Even though we deal with content everyday — whether reading, writing, or designing it — typography can be daunting to delve into because it’s filled with jargon and subjectivity, and it’s uncommon to see it taught extensively at school.
This is intended as a practical guide for developers to learn web typography. We’ll cover a range of practical and useful topics, like how to choose and use custom fonts on the web, but more importantly, how to lay text out to create a pleasant user experience. We’ll go over the principles of typography and the CSS properties that control them, as well as handy tips to get good results, quickly.
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