Whenever you’re putting a new website online there’s no simple way to attract lots of visitors. Social media allows for a much faster viral growth process. But ultimately you need to find different marketing outlets to build up links, so more people will find your website over time.

I want to share a few tips for Internet marketing which should be done right after a new website launch. There is a laundry list of trends you can follow which really bring attention to newer websites. And of course this isn’t an exhaustive list, but merely a guide for getting started. Different niche websites will benefit from various marketing strategies, and it’s up to you to determine which of these content-specific strategies will work best!

Generate Lots of Backlinks

A backlink is basically any anchor href which points to a page on your website. Right after launching online the best way to gain credibility is by linking directly to your homepage. You can build these links quickly by creating social profiles on websites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, and others.

Another quick way for gaining backlinks is through blog comments. If there are blogs online in your niche it’s worthwhile to visit some articles and drop a few comments. Even 3-4 comments a day will rack up tremendously over a couple weeks’ time. And those comments will stay online forever as long as the website stays up and doesn’t prune older articles.

It’s also notable that the link text will affect how Google ranks your website. If your backlink text reads “Web Design Ledger” it will produce different results than linking with “Website Design Blog”. In fact most search engines will rank backlinks in accordance with their text and match against related keywords.

Adding a Personal Touch

It never hurts targeting a specific market share and personally contacting individuals who may be interested in your website. I often find e-mails which invite me to join new startups or social networks online. Most of the time I won’t join because I’m just so busy – but I always at least take a minute to look at the website and gauge an opinion.

One place you might consider scouting is on related forums or message boards. There are some very popular website forums out there in almost any topic you can think of. Automotive, technology, Internet, web design, gaming, cooking, you name it! And these forums are often filled with members who are very interested in the topic at hand.

The goal when directly contacting people is to not sound like a spam robot. Add a personal touch to your messages by addressing each person by name, or why you chose to contact them specifically. Even via e-mail this method for Internet marketing is a lot slower, but will produce results given enough patience and repetition.

Flow with Information

I can’t stress enough how marketing your website needs to be geared towards people who would be interested in your topic. Aside from bulletin boards there are other network-specific websites worthy of some attention.

Most notably Yahoo! Answers is a very popular Q&A network powered by community members. You can sign up for a free account and help answer existing questions related to your niche. After you amass 250 points you’ll be able to include links in all your responses. Getting some major backlinks on Yahoo! Answers is one very powerful way to start leaking your website onto the Internet.

The Y! Answers portal has very high-rankings with Google searches when people are looking for answers to specific questions. If you can answer enough questions with Best Answer rankings then you may find small influxes of keyword-related referral traffic! This is a very natural SEO-friendly method which requires some invested time, but will be worthwhile in the long run.

Public Updates with Social Media

Blogs and Online Magazines have the ability to update their readers from the homepage with new site features and related news. However other websites are not often able to do so, or even with a company blog just don

With new additions or changes to HTML5 happening quite frequently, it can become hard to remember all the new various features.

The cheat sheets are broken up into three graphics:

• Tags
• Event Handler Content Attributes
• Browser Support

Each differentiates between the new, existing, and unsupported features of HTML5. The clean visual grid is easy to run through, lending itself to be a very practical tool for a busy designer/developer. The most useful aspect of it all – it is print-ready for you to pin up on your wall for quick and easy referencing.

HTML5 Tags Cheat Sheet

HTML5 Event Handler Content Attribute Cheat Sheet

HTML5 Browser Support Cheat Sheet

As a user, don’t you hate it when you click a button, only to realize that the resulting action really isn’t what you wanted at all? Sometimes this is a minor annoyance and sometimes it’s a complete disaster that ruins hours or even days of work.

As a designer, it’s up to you to help your users avoid these tragic mistakes whenever possible. Today we’ll look at some methods that you can use to achieve this goal.

What’s The Big Deal?

When you’re designing an interface, whether it’s on the web or in some sort of native application, you always want to carefully consider what can go wrong. Try to imagine the worst case scenario for every particular action that a user will take in the course of using your app and do whatever you can to make sure they understand the consequences of a click.

Why go through all of the trouble? Because there’s nothing that will make a user hate an app quicker than if they make a big mistake with it. Whether it’s completely their own fault or not, they’ll blame the application or, at the very least, develop a distrust for your product. When you give users the chance to discuss your product, “regret” and “distrust” are two words that you don’t want to come up in the conversation.

Tip: Warning Messages Suck

Now, when given the goal of making sure that a user never makes a mistake, some UI designers will go overboard and institute warning messages for every little action that the user could possibly take. Unfortunately, from a user’s perspective, this is the most annoying thing that a developer could do.

If I feel like you’re holding my hand too much through the process of using your app, I’ll resent you for thinking that I’m an idiot. I’ll also quickly get frustrated that everything takes so long because I have to work through the same warning messages over and over.

So When Can I Use a Warning Message?

The real trick for you as you’re planning the app is to decide what actions merit warning messages. There’s a happy medium between never warning a user and overdoing it, and it’s a tricky spot to find.

The guiding question is a simple one: “How easy is it to fix the problem if something goes wrong?” Put yourself in the user’s shoes and try to imagine the worst case scenario.

Let’s imagine a situation where you’re building a simple todo app similar to Wunderlist shown above. One action that the user might take is to check off a task and make it disappear. If they do this on accident or change their mind, ideally, they’d be able to get it back. But even without that functionally, typing in a simple todo title again really isn’t that much work. It should only take a second for the user to rectify their mistake. Given this fact, a warning message probably won’t be necessary for deleting a todo.

Now, what about if the same user wants to delete an entire list of todo items? This is something that could potentially be disastrous. If I have over a hundred todos and accidentally delete an entire list, I’m going to freak out if I can’t get it back. In that case, a warning message is definitely appropriate.

Help Prevent Screw-ups

Now that we have a feel for how warning messages can be good or bad, it’s time to take a look at some different methods that you can use and how they help prevent user screw-ups. Some of them use warning messages, others are a little more clever and tactful.

Preemptive Warnings

The reason that warning messages are so annoying is that they stop you dead in your tracks. This is only pleasant if you realize that you were about to make a big mistake, the rest of the time it simply blocks your progress.

One way to eliminate this while still helping your users prevent mistakes is by using preemptive warnings. These don’t get in your way or inhibit your progress, but they do help you realize that you may have made a mistake.

You see this most often in live form validation. Check out how the Mailchimp sign up form tells me that I’ve made a mistake after typing in a user name that is only three characters long.

Are You Sure?

This is the most common type of warning used throughout web and native apps. It’s what we saw before with Wunderlist: a box that pops up, stops whatever you were trying to do and asks whether or not this is something you really wanted to do.

You likely see these pretty much all day every day if you work on a computer. For example, Mac users see one when they try to empty their trash.

If we weigh Apple’s decision to put this here against the criteria that we set up earlier, then it checks out. As the window states, emptying the trash is not something that a user can do. Once you hit that button, those files are completely gone unless you’re the type of tech savvy nerd who knows how to get them back.

What Do You Want to Happen?

Sometimes a given action could be interpreted in more than one way. In these situations, you either have to choose between the interpretations as the designer or give the user the power choose what consequences the action will have.

Photoshop is an excellent example of this. When you drag a layer mask to the trash can, you get the following window.

Here Photoshop is saying, “Hey, I know you want me to ditch this layer mask, but should I apply it first?” This is a helpful option because sometimes it is indeed the case that I want the mask to disappear completely and other times I want it applied to the layer. They also provide a hidden keyboard shortcut (Option) for pro users who want to skip this window.

Never Show This Again

There’s another interesting lesson to

Clean, simple web designs have become a popular trend. This article will cover the subject through a two-part discussion. First, we’ll talk about a few traits that clean designs tend to have in common. Secondly, I’ll share some tricks and techniques that can be helpful when trying to achieve a clean design.

Common Traits of a Clean Web Design

Let’s start by looking at some fundamental characteristics of clean web designs.

Solid Web Page Layout Structure

If you take a few minutes to browse sites that might fall into the “clean” category, I’d be willing to bet they all have one thing in common: a well-thought-out grid that the designer is really putting to work.

For anyone not familiar with designing with a grid, just imagine that each comp starts with an invisible structure of columns and rows, and that structure drives the scale and placement of the elements in the composition. This grid creates a sense of order by helping designers establish hierarchy, rhythm and consistency.

Pixel Dreams is designed in a grid using the popular 960 Grid System.

A solid grid layout structure provides order and unity. For instance, Creative Review has several page layouts for certain types of content, however, the browsing experience is continuous because they all share the same underlying framework.

When a site has a lot of content to display, such as an online magazine or a newspaper site, achieving a clean design aesthetic can be more difficult. But sites like The Guardian, a British newspaper, show that it’s possible with a well-thought-out layout grid.

If all their content were plopped onto the page without a solid structure, the front page would definitely be a mess. However, by using their grid as a starting point and relying on rules and white space to establish hierarchy, the robust content feels far from overwhelming. Every pixel of margin and every rule was tweaked until it was “just right,” and all that effort resulted in a layout that feels effortless.

Here are two resources that will help you learn more about designing on a grid:

• A Brief Look at Grid-Based Layouts in Web Design
• The 960 Grid System Made Easy

Good Typography

It seems that good typography often centers around doing more with less, and when it comes to getting that “squeaky clean” feel in your designs, restraint is key.

When too many typefaces are used, they compete with one another, making a design appear disjointed and disorderly.

If you do a quick survey of well-designed sites, you’ll probably find they rely on one or two typefaces, and then vary size, case, color and weight to establish a clear typographic hierarchy.

This approach creates a sense of consistency and refinement that can be seen on sites such as The New York Times and The Mavenist.

he New York Times

The Mavenist

In both examples above, there are no more than two typefaces in the style sheets, yet the designers have established clear hierarchies by using those typefaces to their fullest.

Good typography is best displayed in the details. Leading, the spaces between lines of text, can help make content easy to read and pleasing to the eye. When there’s just enough space, the reader’s eye can easily return from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. In web design, leading can be adjusted through the line-height CSS property.

The optimal ratio of type size to leading often depends on the typeface, color and width of the text block.

Additionally, letter-spacing, the space between letters, can allow the letterforms to breathe a bit.

Here are some resources related to web typography:

• A Basic Look at Typography in Web Design
• CSS Typography: The Basics
• CSS Typography: Techniques and Best Practices
• CSS Typography: Examples and Tools

Limited Color Palette

In print design, color is often limited by necessity. A budget may allow for only a two-color poster, and so the designer is forced to work within those constraints.

That’s never the case with websites, though, since most modern computer monitors can display millions of colors.

However, cleanly-designed sites seem to trend toward limited color palettes. From what I’ve seen, these sites often use core grays and one color. The color is earmarked for the most important elements (like links and headers), a trick that not only enhances usability but also helps to visually unite elements throughout the site.

A1 rolls this direction, using a bluish green and gray color palette.

Meanwhile, the fine folks at Fuzzco take it all the way down to a single color: red.

Clean designs that successfully push beyond one- or two-color palettes often do so by using color sparingly and by using neutral colors to break things up. Solo is a great example of this.

Just like the connection between typeface and message, it’s not all about picking colors that look good. Stronger designs incorporate palettes that set a visual tone which echoes the site’s content.

For example, bright, complementary colors make sense for Notologist because of the nature of the site.

Consistent Imagery

Does it bother you when the style of imagery (photography, illustrations, charts, etc.) shifts from page to page throughout a site? Me too.

Making sure these visually prominent elements are stylistically in harmony is a pretty powerful trick when it comes to creating a site with a clean appearance.

For example, IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign touched on dozens of topics. Throughout the related print and interactive materials, illustrations and charts that share geometrical frameworks, bold strokes and saturated colors help tie the campaign’s materials and topics together.

And over on Protein, you’ll notice that even though the photography for the profiles comes out of different shoots, there is a carefully produced similarity across the images in terms of composition, depth of field and quality of light. Consistency across these often-prominent elements helps viewers look past individual pieces and see the sites as a whole.

Obviously, there are instances where it just isn’t practical to produce all the imagery in the same style. News sites and blogs can’t throw out a great image that enhances a story just because it doesn’t fit with others.

And sometimes clients don’t have budgets to produce new charts and illustrations, so the designer is forced to make existing assets work. I’ve noticed that in these cases the use of graphic elements around the imagery, such as borders, can help inconsistent imagery feel a bit more uniform.

Tips for Achieving Clean Designs

What follows are a few tips for producing clean web designs.

Start Complex, Then Simplify

Putting things on the page is part of the design process. In my experience, one of the traps designers can easily fall into when they set out to create something “simple” is becoming afraid to add anything to the page. The resulting designs are usually pretty bland because the process didn’t allow for exploration (and those “happy design accidents” we all love).

To avoid this problem, I find that it’s helpful to “start complex, then simplify.”

In the early phases of the design, don’t limit what you put on the page. Explore different layers of content and try out different design elements. Then, once that design feels like it could be close to complete, start to simplify.

Ask yourself, “what doesn’t really need to be here?” If dropping a design element (like a rule or texture) seems to make the page fall apart, keep it around. But, if that’s not the case, ditch it.

We’ve all heard the adage that 20% ends up doing 80% of the work. We’re just applying that theory to design by identifying the elements that are doing the heavy lifting in our layouts. (Read more about this subject: Reductionism in Web Design.)

It may even be worth bringing in someone who’s more detached from the design for an outside opinion on what should stay and what should go. If you can’t give a more solid defense for why something should be on the page other than “it’s cool” or “they do it on this other site,” then remove it.

Ultimately, you’ll be left with the ingredients that will give you the strongest design. Once you get there, a little bit of fine-tuning should leave you with a strong, uncluttered design.

Tweak, and Tweak Some More

I’ve been told that I tend to “beat my page designs into submission.” Honestly, I take that as a compliment.

To me, a design is never really “finished” and can always be pushed further. Seriously, just ask any designer or student who has had the unfortunate luck of working with me. I’m guessing it’s not all that fun when I ask them to try another shade of green for the twelfth time.

As we explored earlier, that “clean” feel is the product of all the aspects of the design — composition, hierarchy, palette and typography — working harmoniously. If you’re like me, making that happen means a lot of time spent tweaking: adding a point of line-spacing here, removing 2px of margin there, trying #ddd instead of #eee for the dotted rules, etc. These may seem like inconsequential adjustments, but when it comes to getting all the elements in a composition to work together, a single pixel can make a big difference.

So, tweak, and then tweak some more. One tweak will lead to another, and sometimes what you uncover will lead you to fork your designs or backtrack.

Making something look clean and cohesive is a process that takes time and persistence (and, generally, a lot of coffee).

But, if you stick with it, all the details will eventually fall into place and the design will become cohesive.

Don’t Miss the Big Picture

In my previous life as a “mostly print designer,” printing and pinning up your layouts was a daily ritual. The firm’s walls were saturated with everything from annual reports to logo explorations.

But something funny happened when I started to focus on web design — I stopped printing. It was almost like I decided that because the project would never see a press, it never needed to see paper.

After a long spell of blank walls (and subsequent blocks of frustration with how my projects were coming together), it hit me. The beauty of printing and pinning was seeing the big picture.

I was missing my chance to evaluate the system as a whole, shore up throughlines, and find opportunities to simplify.

Flipping through layers in Illustrator or Photoshop just doesn’t offer the same perspective as seeing all the comps side by side.

So, my suggestion is to print, pin and repeat. It’ll help you identify inconsistencies and find opportunities to synchronize your layouts, all of which will result in a cleaner design. (Sorry trees.)

Conclusion

Whether you’re well-versed in the creation of “clean” design or looking to move in that direction, respect for imagination followed by attention to detail will go a long way.

As I said early on, an organic but intentional process — not standards and rulebooks — will come in most handy. Of course, each designer has moments of magic throughout his or her individual process.

It can be a challenge convincing clients to add new strategies to their existing Web presence.

In a perfect world, a client would simply say, “You’re the expert. You know what’s best. Do whatever needs to be done to make it happen!” But, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that.

Granted, we shouldn’t expect smart business managers to implement every new thing just because we tell them it’s a good idea. That wouldn’t be cost effective. But what if you know in your gut that the future of a client’s business may be at stake?

With Google executives saying things like “I believe that in 3 years desktop computers will be irrelevant…” and studies by Gartner stating that “Websites not formatted for the smaller screen will become a market barrier…” the Mobile Web is one of your gut instincts you want your clients to follow. And follow now!

In a state of desperate urgency, you may be tempted to place all diplomacy aside, and just tell it to them straight, perhaps even reminding them of those other times they put off your advice. I like to call this the “Timeline of Lost Opportunities” tactic.

You may very well have clients who respond to that type of pressure, but more likely, you will need to ease your clients into the idea of a full-on Mobile Web strategy.

Below is a plan that can help. I’ve even included graphics in each step since, as the old adage goes, “A picture is worth a thousand different ways of pleading with one’s clients.” (Or something like that.)

Step 1: Show Them the Money

The Mobile Web is upon us, whether we like it or not. People are using mobile devices to search, shop and click through on ads at unprecedented rates. And rates that are only expected to grow. Presenting numbers like those shown above, as well as information on how their competitors may already be capitalizing on the Mobile Web, can get your clients listening.

Step 2: Show Them What Their Customers Expect

Mobile device users search the Internet as often as they use apps, so having a mobile-ready website is important. Mobile consumers know what they want from a website, and typically take action once they get there. It’s important that your clients understand that their customers have different expectations of what a mobile website does and provides compared to their existing website. Mobile conversion rates can be impressive, but only if a website caters to the expectations of this mobile audience.

Step 3: Outline Best Practices and Give Them Choices

Once you’ve shown your clients how people use mobile devices, it should become more apparent that they need a mobile version of their website. Mobile website solutions need not be complicated or expensive. Show your clients some options, such as responsive web design or going with a dedicated mobile-optimized version of the site (along with the pros and cons of each) while emphasizing mobile website best practices.

Step 4: Help Them Decide Whether They Need a Mobile App

Mobile app usage is impressive, but while people do spend a lot of time using mobile apps, most of that time is spent on games and social networking. So does your client really need a mobile app? You can help them decide by weighing the pros and cons of mobile app development, and presenting ways they can optimize their mobile website as an alternative.

Step 5: Explain the Marketplace and Mobile App Nuances

A good mobile app strategy should analyze current marketplace trends and weigh the pros and cons of developing native apps versus web apps. Be sure to explain how the mobile marketplace works as well as the difference between native and web apps. This can help your clients make more informed decisions.

Step 6: Show Them Options and Give Them Choices

Mobile app solutions vary in price and complexity. Outline options for your client that include using HTML5 or one of the many do-it-yourself mobile app tools available today. Make your recommendations based on the client’s present and future needs.

Step 7: Introduce Other Mobile Marketing Tactics

The Mobile Web is more than just websites and apps. From QR codes to augmented reality, there are a host of tactics and tools you can implement to help your clients promote their business on the Mobile Web. Help your clients understand the importance of mobile-optimized landing pages. When they are marketing to a mobile audience, it is imperative that clients ultimately send potential customers to landing pages and other sources compatible with the customer’s mobile device.

The goal should be to educate your clients on the “hows” and “whys” of the Mobile Web and to help them understand their options. This approach can ultimately help them make informed decisions as they consider your recommendations.

Since the first GUIs introduced word processors with a selection of fonts virtually anyone with a computer has been able to set their own type (before that we even had typewriters – remember those?) and, for the most part, that’s a good thing. The world as we know it would be very inefficient indeed if every school report, office party invitation or missing cat poster had to be manually set by trained professionals. However, Microsoft Word doesn’t ship with The Complete Manual for Aspiring Typographers – in fact it doesn’t ship with any design sense at all – and so the masses uncritically embrace the MS conventions, blissfully unaware of the centuries (some say millenia) of principles from which professional typography draws from today.

Now, if you’re a designer and you know your typography you probably won’t learn anything new from this little post, though it might help educate your clients about some common myths and mistakes in layman’s typography. At the very least I hope you’ll grimace in agreement as I run through a few gripes of mine with typographical practices perpetuated by non-designers.

Here goes.

Double Space After Full Stop (.)

Let’s be clear about it: there is no need for double spaces after full stops. You may never have encountered, or noticed, this phenomena, but if you have you’ll know how annoying it is to have to go through the lot and correct it (granted, search and replace makes this easier than it used to be, but auto-correcting a 100 page document without manually controlling the result is never a good idea). When I used to work in print, removing double spaces was a routine and part of our artwork preparation cheat-sheet. But where did all those extra spaces come from?

Is the double space (top) necessary to divide the sentences or is a single space (bottom) enough?

Double spacing, i.e. the insertion of two spaces after full stops, became popular with the introduction of the typewriter in the late 1800s. As typewriters were using monospaced fonts it was felt that a single word space wasn’t wide enough to sufficiently separate sentences. Hence, an extra space was inserted to help mark the end of a sentence.

That may well have been a reasonable concern a few decades ago, as noticing the start of a new sentence definitely helps readability (though if personally I think a single space is sufficient even for typewriters). Nowadays, however, type designers assign appropriate horizontal space to each character – including the humble full stop – making double spacing obsolete. A single space combined with a capitalized first word marks the next sentence clear as day. So please, let’s just stop it. (I seriously considered including the word “full” in that last sentence, but figured such a pun would conjure involuntary facepalms and stop you from reading the rest of the article.)

Title case headers

Speaking of capitalising first words, how about capitalising all of them (in headers, that is)? Up next, the incredibly annoying and, unfortunately, equally wide-spread: Title Case Headers.

Typography: Common Myths and Mistakes

Sentence case (bottom) makes sense for readability – why do we cling to disturbing capitalisation (top)?

Some people mistakenly refer to title case as camel case, though the comparison is fitting: using title case makes your headline about as calming and legible as a line of camels stampeding across the page. Why on earth would people insist on a practice that deters readability?

Capitalising headers goes back a long time and probably stems from the Germanic urge to capitalize “important” words. Historically we’ve capitalized a lot – including nouns, pronouns, places, honorifics, even adjectives – and we still do (the specifics depending on where you’re from.

As a result the rules of titling are a tad confusing: Capitalize all words, except for for closed-class words such as articles, conjunctions and prepositions. Unless the preposition is a long word like “Between”, that is. Oh, and capitalize pronouns, even though they’re closed-class. And just make your own mind up when it comes to hyphenated words. What gives?

Whether it’s all words or just nouns, ultimately it seems to be about adding emphasis or importance to words. Surely, though, the whole headline is emphasised by definition so unless you want to go full uppercase, why not just leave it as it is? Fortunately that’s exactly what many British publishers (including The Economist, The Guardian, The Times) decided to do, and we’re better for it. Sentence case is much easier to read, and no-one (well, apart from the Germans) capitalizes nouns anymore anyway.

Justified Text

If there’s any client request that invites my confused face more than “can you make my logo bigger?” it’s got to be “justify everything”. It’s easy to reason against it, of course, but just what is it about justified text that makes it so appealing? It seems every Tom, Dick and Harry wants – no, craves – it, no matter how illegible it makes their copy.

Notice the islands and rivers of white space in the justified paragraph (left) contra the even spacing of the left aligned )(right). Which is easier to read?

Historically it was thought that left aligned text was “disorderly” due to the irregular lines on the right side, and so justified compositions became part of a tradition of symmetrical construction around the central folds of pages. That’s history, however, and I fail to see the reason why this idea is so prevalent still. Granted, when it’s done right justified text may to some look a tad “prettier” than left-aligned, but if the modernist typographers taught us anything it’s that the purpose of typography is not to be pretty, but to be readable.

And that brings into question another argument for justified text: that it utilises the space better. This is partly a fallacy as justified text doesn’t actually fit much more on a line, it mainly moves the irregular spaces from the right hand side into your content. This creates disturbing rivers of white space that actually prohibits good readability (you can help this by carefully adjusting your H&Js in inDesign, though it’s not possible with CSS).

In short, don’t go for justified text unless you really have a good reason to – if you want to save space or can’t live with irregular lines, hyphenate and manually add soft breaks to even it out. If you can’t do that (web has it’s limitations), just suck it up. The readability of your content is, after all, more important than forced symmetry.

“In a perfect world, all text should be unjustified and range left.” – Enric Jardi

Double or Single Line Space?

Back in school, I was always told to set our my essays in a certain font at a certain size (usually 12pt) at a certain line space – either 1.5 or double. Umm, double what, exactly? For reasons unknown Microsoft Word decided to dumb down their software and not only change the term leading to line space but also change our concept of it from points (“please set the text at 12pt using a leading of 15pt”) to vague units (“you’re probably too stupid to understand the basic concept of leading, so just hit the button that says “double line space”).

Granted, a limited set of line space variables may be easier to comprehend for the end users – if we underestimate and patronise them – and the consistency of school reports may be impeccable, but at what cost? Imagine if plumbers and electricians all used the metric system, whilst consumers were only taught imperial in school – it simply wouldn’t be very efficient. Changing the global consumer’s understanding of the any typographical concept only extends the bridge between designers and our clients. I know explaining leading to people is pretty straightforward, but wouldn’t it be easier if we all spoke the same language and used the same units of measurement? Refering to leading as single or double line space is not just confusing, it’s also inaccurate.

Now, why CSS calls it line-height is a different story.

Bold and Italics as Styles

One of my biggest gripes with MS Word and any other simplistic “publishing” software and “WYSIWYG” editors is how they apply bold and italics (again, CSS is not without guilt). I’m not criticising the usability here – clicking a button or, better still, pressing CMD+B is quicker than selecting “Helvetica bold italic” from a dropdown – but I am questioning underlying concept. As with line spacing, the simplified alternatives to professional typography offered by mass-market software creates separate sets of terminology and understanding. Reducing bolds and italics to mere buttons infers that they are simply styles applied to whatever font you’re using. They’re not. They’re carefully crafted fonts emerged from months of hard work and incredible attention to detail. And I’m not even a type designer – imagine how they feel!

Bold: Akzidenz Grotesk (AG) regular with bold applied in MS Word (top) and AG bold as supplied by the foundry (bottom)

Italic: AG regular with italic applied in MS Word (top) and AG italic as supplied by the foundry (bottom).

Not that it’s about feelings. It’s about integrity and respect for the typographic profession. If you apply italic without having the italic font of a particular typeface installed, MS Word will create the italic font for you. That’s right. The computer – not a type designer – alters the font to what it determines the font should look like. Not only does this result in sub-par typography, it also makes it unnecessarily difficult to explain to a client why they need to fork out for the whole family of fonts in order to get the range of weights needed.

So make sure your client knows it: they’re not styles, they’re fonts.

Fantasy fonts

Ah, the fantasy fonts. Isn’t it just amazing that we can write the word “Cactus” with prickly letters and use a font made from vine leaves to spell out “Wine”? No. It’s not. There is no need to use Bleeding Cowboy to accompany your Western comic, nor is Double Feature the ideal typeface for a bloody horror flick.

The timeless elegance of the original Scream poster is easily ridiculed by using an over-the-top fantasy font.

Choosing the right typeface is a difficult process, but using the physical attributes of the thing you’re designing for as the criteria to make the choice is seldom a good idea. Instead, choosing a typeface that compliments the underlying emotions or mood of the text often leads to a more subtle, professional and timeless result. Better still, don’t worry too much about adding flair to the text you’re setting. Instead make sure you’re not communicating anything you – or the author – does not want to communicate. For example, setting a party invitation in Comic Sans (though not strictly a fantasy font) might communicate that the party is informal, but it also signals that it will be immature, childish and completely void of finesse.

All typography conveys a certain mood or atmosphere, and it does so best through subtle means. If the difference between serif, slab and sans isn’t quite enough variation, imagine the incredible diversity available when adding different weights, cases, tracking and contrast to the mix. Some would even argue we have too much variation and that a single font – Helvetica, for example – is all we need.