I’ve recently made yet another attempt to do so some web design myself. Of course that ended up being a total fiasco, like every single time before that. But as every single time before that, I’ve learned something new. This time, my focus was around typography. The current trend towards a gadzillion web fonts is probably one of the biggest changes in web design that I see. Google Web Fonts alone is a resource one could spend countless hours at.
And just as I’ve wrapped up and threw away my web design attempt, I came across an article on responsive typography. And the very first paragraph of it confirmed what I have realized myself.
With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts and custom web fonts. Now, screens are changing not just in size, but also in pixel density. In other words: we do not just need responsive layouts, we also need responsive typefaces.
Unlike me though, the authors seems to have a pretty good idea of what they are talking about.