18 Enhancing Page Text with Typography
90 percent of design is typography. —Jeffrey Zeldman
This chapter covers
- Setting the typeface
- Working with Google fonts
- Styling your web page words and paragraphs
Do you want to know the secret of great web design? Specifically, do you want to know the one design element common to almost all the best websites? The hidden-in-plain-sight design secret shared by nearly every outstanding website can be summed up in just two words:
Typography matters.
Typography—styles applied to enhance the legibility, readability, and appearance of text—is the web’s secret sauce, its magic dust. When you come across a site that has aesthetic appeal, chances are that a big chunk of that appeal comes from the site’s use of fonts, text sizes and styles, spacing, and other matters typographical. The site has text appeal.
If you want the same appeal on your own web pages, you need only remember those two all-important words: Typography matters. Typefaces matter. Type sizes and styles matter. Spacing, alignment, and indents matter. Fortunately, as you see in this chapter, CSS comes with a large set of typographical tools that you can wield to spruce up your text. No, you don’t have the level of control that you get in a desktop page-layout program, but there are enough CSS properties and values to show the world that you care about your web page text.