Tips For Designing With Typography and Color

Every designer wrestles with the use of good typography. In print, and especially on the Web, type can make or break a design. See the tips and examples below from ColorLovers. Be inspired and have fun!

clipped from www.colorlovers.com Font Size, Line Height & Contrast Bad Color Choices and Bad Contrast Example: Example 2: (12pt Font, 13pt Line Height - Low Contrast) The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. Contrast: Visual Appeal Without Pictures: Good Text Design Enhances Your Message: Readability: For web designers, different browsers can also cause readability issues. In Firefox the page displays with no problems, but in IE 6 gray boxes appear behind the text that makes it nearly impossible to read. Here is another page as it appears in Firefox. The same page in IE 6.

Finally, in these days of high-bandwidth and Flash glitz and glamor, remember to think about usability. Proper use of tagging and HTML will do wonders for your audience.