rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 167,Back To The Future of Print,"By now we have weathered the storm that was the early days of web development, a dangerous time when we used tables, inline CSS and separate pages for print only versions. We can reflect in a haggard old sea-dog manner (“yarrr… I remember back in the browser wars…”) on the bad practices of the time. We no longer need convincing that print stylesheets are the way to go1, though some of the documentation for them is a little outdated now. I am going to briefly cover 8 tips and 4 main gotchas when creating print stylesheets in our more enlightened era. Getting started As with regular stylesheets, print CSS can be included in a number of ways2, for our purposes we are going to be using the link element. This is still my favourite way of linking to CSS files, its easy to see what files are being included and to what media they are being applied to. Without the media attribute specified the link element defaults to the media type ‘all’ which means that the styles within then apply to print and screen alike. The media type ‘screen’ only applies to the screen and wont be picked up by print, this is the best way of hiding styles from print. Make sure you include your print styles after all your other CSS, because you will need to override certain rules and this is a lot easier if you are flowing with the cascade than against it! Another thing you should be thinking is ‘does it need to be printed’. Consider the context3, if it is not a page that is likely to be printed, such as a landing page or a section index then the print styles should resemble the way the page looks on the screen. Context is really important for the design of your print stylesheet, all the tips and tricks that follow should be taken in the context of the page. If for example you are designing a print stylesheet for an item in a shopping cart, it is irrelevant for the user to know the exact url of the link that takes them to your checkout. Tips and tricks During these tip’s we are going to build up print styles for a textileRef:11112857385470b854b8411:linkStartMarker:“simple example”:/examples/back-to-the-future-of-print/demo-1.html 1. Remove the cruft First things first, navigation, headers and most page furniture are pretty much useless and dead space in print so they will need to be removed, using display:none;. 2. Linearise your content Content doesn’t work so well in columns in print, especially if the content columns are long and intend to stretch over multiple columns (as mentioned in the gotcha section below). You might want to consider Lineariseing the content to flow down the page. If you have your source order in correct priority this will make things a lot easier4. 3. Improve your type Once you have removed all the useless cruft and jiggled things about a bit, you can concentrate more on the typography of the page. Typography is a complex topic5, but simply put serif-ed fonts such as Georgia work better on print and sans serif-ed fonts such as Verdana are more appropriate for screen use. You will probably want to increase font size and line height and change from px to pt (which is specifically a print measurement). 4. Go wild on links There are some incredibly fun things you can do with links in print using CSS. There are two schools of thought, one that consider it is best to disguise inline links as body text because they are not click-able on paper. Personally I believe it is useful to know for reference that the document did link to somewhere originally. When deciding which approach to take, consider the context of your document, do people need to know where they would have gone to? will it help or hinder them to know this information? Also for an alternative to the below, take a look at Aaron Gustafson’s article on generating footnotes for print6. Using some clever selector trickery and CSS generated content you can have the location of the link generated after the link itself. HTML:

I wish Google could find my keys

CSS: a:link:after, a:visited:after, a:hover:after, a:active:after { content: "" <"" attr(href) ""> ""; } But this is not perfect, in the above example the content of the href is just naively plonked after the link text: I wish Google would find my keys As looking back over this printout the user is not immediately aware of the location of the link, a better solution is to use even more crazy selectors to deal with relative links. We can also add a style to the generated content so it is distinguishable from the link text itself. CSS: a:link:after, a:visited:after, a:hover:after, a:active:after { content: "" <"" attr(href) ""> ""; color: grey; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; } a[href^=""/""]:after { content: "" ""; } The output is now what we were looking for (you will need to replace example.com with your own root URL): I wish Google would find my keys Using regular expressions on the attribute selectors, one final thing you can do is to suppress the generated content on mailto: links, if for example you know the link text always reflects the email address. Eg: HTML: me@example.com CSS: a[href^=""mailto""]:after { content: """"; } This example shows the above in action. Of course with this clever technique, there are the usual browser support issues. While it won’t look as intended in browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (IE6 and IE7) it will not break either and will just degrade gracefully because IE cannot do generated content. To the best of my knowledge Safari 2+ and Opera 9.X support a colour set on generated content whereas Firefox 2 & Camino display this in black regardless of the link or inherited text colour. 5. Jazz your headers for print This is more of a design consideration, don’t go too nuts though; there are a lot more limitations in print media than on screen. For this example we are going to go for is having a bottom border on h2’s and styling other headings with graduating colors or font sizes. And here is the example complete with jazzy headers. 6. Build in general hooks If you are building a large site with many different types of page, you may find it useful to build into your CSS structure, classes that control what is printed (e.g. noprint and printonly). This may not be semantically ideal, but in the past I have found it really useful for maintainability of code across large and varied sites 7. For that extra touch of class When printing pages from a long URL, even if the option is turned on to show the location of the page in the header, browsers may still display a truncated (and thus useless) version. Using the above tip (or just simply setting to display:none in screen and display:block in print) you can insert the URL of the page you are currently on for print only, using JavaScript’s window.location.href variable. function addPrintFooter() { var p = document.createElement('p'); p.className = 'print-footer'; p.innerHTML = window.location.href; document.body.appendChild(p); } You can then call this function using whichever onload or ondomready handler suits your fancy. Here is our familiar demo to show all the above in action 8. Tabular data across pages If you are using tabled data in your document there are a number of things you can do to increase usability of long tables over several pages. If you use the element this should repeat your table headers on the next page should your table be split. You will need to set thead {display: table-header-group;} explicitly for IE even though this should be the default value. Also if you use tr {page-break-inside: avoid;} this should (browser support depending) stop your table row from breaking across two pages. For more information on styling tables for print please see the CSS discuss wiki7. Gotchas 1. Where did all my content go? Absolutely the most common mistake I see with print styles is the truncated content bug. The symptom of this is that only the first page of a div’s content will be printed, the rest will look truncated after this. Floating long columns may still have this affect, as mentioned in Eric Meyer’s article on ‘A List Apart’ article from 20028; though in testing I am no longer able to replicate this. Using overflow:hidden on long content in Firefox however still causes this truncation. Overflow hidden is commonly used to clear floats9. A simple fix can be applied to resolve this, if the column is floated you can override this with float:none similarly overflow:hidden can be overridden with overflow:visible or the offending rules can be banished to a screen only stylesheet. Using position:absolute on long columns also has a very similar effect in truncating the content, but can be overridden in print with position:static; Whilst I only recommend having a print stylesheet for content pages on your site; do at least check other landing pages, section indexes and your homepage. If these are inaccessible in print possibly due to the above gotcha, it might be wise to provide a light dusting of print styles or move the offending overflow / float rules to a screen only stylesheet to fix the issues. 2. Damn those background browser settings One of the factors of life you now need to accept is that you can’t control the user’s browser settings, no more than you can control whether or not they use IE6. Most browsers by default will not print background colours or images unless explicitly told to by the user. Naturally this causes a number of problems, for starters you will need to rethink things like branding. At this point it helps if you are doing the print styles early in the project so that you can control the logo not being a background image for example. Where colour is important to the meaning of the document, for example a status on an invoice, bear in mind that a textural representation will also need to be supplied as the user may be printing in black and white. Borders will print however regardless of setting, so assuming the user is printing in colour you can always use borders to indicate colour. Check the colour contrast of the text against white, this may need to be altered without backgrounds. You should check how your page looks with backgrounds turned on too, for consistency with the default browser settings you may want to override your background anyway. One final issue with backgrounds being off is list items. It is relatively common practice to suppress the list-style-type and replace with a background image to finely control the bullet positioning. This technique doesn’t translate to print, you will need to disable this background bullet and re-instate your trusty friend the list-style-type. 3. Using JavaScript in your CSS? … beware IE6 Internet explorer has an issue that when Javascript is used in a stylesheet it applies this to all media types even if only applied to screen. For example, if you happen to be using expressions to set a width for IE, perhaps to mimic min-width, a simple width:100% !important rule can overcome the effects the expression has on your print styles10. 4. De-enhance your Progressive enhancements Quite a classic “doh” moment is when you realise that, of course paper doesn’t support Javascript. If you have any dynamic elements on the page, for example a document collapsed per section, you really should have been using Progressive enhancement techniques11 and building for browsers without Javascript first, adding in the fancy stuff later. If this is the case it should be trivial to override your wizzy JS styles in your print stylesheet, to display all your content and make it accessible for print, which is by far the best method of achieving this affect. And Finally… I refer you back to the nature of the document in hand, consider the context of your site and the page. Use the tips here to help you add that extra bit of flair to your printed media. Be careful you don’t get caught out by the common gotchas, keep the design simple, test cross browser and relish in the medium of print. Further Reading 1 For more information constantly updated, please see the CSS discuss wiki on print stylesheets 2 For more information on media types and ways of including CSS please refer to the CSS discuss wiki on Media Stylesheets 3 Eric Meyer talks to ThinkVitamin about the importance of context when designing your print strategy. 4 Mark Boulton describes how he applies a newspaper like print stylesheet to an article in the Guardian website. Mark also has some persuasive arguments that print should not be left to last 5 Richard Rutter Has a fantastic resource on typography which also applies to print. 6 Aaron Gustafson has a great solution to link problem by creating footnotes at the end of the page. 7 The CSS discuss wiki has more detailed information on printing tables and detailed browser support 8 This ‘A List Apart’ article is dated May 10th 2002 though is still mostly relevant 9 Float clearing technique using ‘overflow:hidden’ 10 Autistic Cuckoo describes the interesting insight with regards to expressions specified for screen in IE6 remaining in print 11 Wikipedia has a good article on the definition of progressive enhancement 12 For a really neat trick involving a dynamically generated column to displaying and meanings (as well as somewhere for the user to write notes), try print previewing on Brian Suda’s site",2007,Natalie Downe,nataliedowne,2007-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/back-to-the-future-of-print/,design 152,CSS for Accessibility,"CSS is magical stuff. In the right hands, it can transform the plainest of (well-structured) documents into a visual feast. But it’s not all fur coat and nae knickers (as my granny used to say). Here are some simple ways you can use CSS to improve the usability and accessibility of your site. Even better, no sexy visuals will be harmed by the use of these techniques. Promise. Nae knickers This is less of an accessibility tip, and more of a reminder to check that you’ve got your body background colour specified. If you’re sitting there wondering why I’m mentioning this, because it’s a really basic thing, then you might be as surprised as I was to discover that from a sample of over 200 sites checked last year, 35% of UK local authority websites were missing their body background colour. Forgetting to specify your body background colour can lead to embarrassing gaps in coverage, which are not only unsightly, but can prevent your users reading the text on your site if they use a different operating system colour scheme. All it needs is the following line to be added to your CSS file: body {background-color: #fff;} If you pair it with color: #000; … you’ll be assured of maintaining contrast for any areas you inadvertently forget to specify, no matter what colour scheme your user needs or prefers. Even better, if you’ve got standard reset CSS you use, make sure that default colours for background and text are specified in it, so you’ll never be caught with your pants down. At the very least, you’ll have a white background and black text that’ll prompt you to change them to your chosen colours. Elbow room Paying attention to your typography is important, but it’s not just about making it look nice. Careful use of the line-height property can make your text more readable, which helps everyone, but is particularly helpful for those with dyslexia, who use screen magnification or simply find it uncomfortable to read lots of text online. When lines of text are too close together, it can cause the eye to skip down lines when reading, making it difficult to keep track of what you’re reading across. So, a bit of room is good. That said, when lines of text are too far apart, it can be just as bad, because the eye has to jump to find the next line. That not only breaks up the reading rhythm, but can make it much more difficult for those using Screen Magnification (especially at high levels of magnification) to find the beginning of the next line which follows on from the end of the line they’ve just read. Using a line height of between 1.2 and 1.6 times normal can improve readability, and using unit-less line heights help take care of any pesky browser calculation problems. For example: p { font-family: ""Lucida Grande"", Lucida, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.3; } or if you want to use the shorthand version: p { font: 1em/1.3 ""Lucida Grande"", Lucida, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; } View some examples of different line-heights, based on default text size of 100%/1em. Further reading on Unitless line-heights from Eric Meyer. Transformers: Initial case in disguise Nobody wants to shout at their users, but there are some occasions when you might legitimately want to use uppercase on your site. Avoid screen-reader pronunciation weirdness (where, for example, CONTACT US would be read out as Contact U S, which is not the same thing – unless you really are offering your users the chance to contact the United States) caused by using uppercase by using title case for your text and using the often neglected text-transform property to fake uppercase. For example: .uppercase { text-transform: uppercase } Don’t overdo it though, as uppercase text is harder to read than normal text, not to mention the whole SHOUTING thing. Linky love When it comes to accessibility, keyboard only users (which includes those who use voice recognition software) who can see just fine are often forgotten about in favour of screen reader users. This Christmas, share the accessibility love and light up those links so all of your users can easily find their way around your site. The link outline AKA: the focus ring, or that dotted box that goes around links to show users where they are on the site. The techniques below are intended to supplement this, not take the place of it. You may think it’s ugly and want to get rid of it, especially since you’re going to the effort of tarting up your links. Don’t. Just don’t. The non-underlined underline If you listen to Jacob Nielsen, every link on your site should be underlined so users know it’s a link. You might disagree with him on this (I know I do), but if you are choosing to go with underlined links, in whatever state, then remove the default underline and replacing it with a border that’s a couple of pixels away from the text. The underline is still there, but it’s no longer cutting off the bottom of letters with descenders (e.g., g and y) which makes it easier to read. This is illustrated in Examples 1 and 2. You can modify the three lines of code below to suit your own colour and border style preferences, and add it to whichever link state you like. text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #000 solid; padding-bottom: 2px; Standing out from the crowd Whatever way you choose to do it, you should be making sure your links stand out from the crowd of normal text which surrounds them when in their default state, and especially in their hover or focus states. A good way of doing this is to reverse the colours when on hover or focus. Well-focused Everyone knows that you can use the :hover pseudo class to change the look of a link when you mouse over it, but, somewhat ironically, people who can see and use a mouse are the group who least need this extra visual clue, since the cursor handily (sorry) changes from an arrow to a hand. So spare a thought for the non-pointing device users that visit your site and take the time to duplicate that hover look by using the :focus pseudo class. Of course, the internets being what they are, it’s not quite that simple, and predictably, Internet Explorer is the culprit once more with it’s frustrating lack of support for :focus. Instead it applies the :active pseudo class whenever an anchor has focus. What this means in practice is that if you want to make your links change on focus as well as on hover, you need to specify focus, hover and active. Even better, since the look and feel necessarily has to be the same for the last three states, you can combine them into one rule. So if you wanted to do a simple reverse of colours for a link, and put it together with the non-underline underlines from before, the code might look like this: a:link { background: #fff; color: #000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #000 solid; padding-bottom: 2px; } a:visited { background: #fff; color: #800080; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #000 solid; padding-bottom: 2px; } a:focus, a:hover, a:active { background: #000; color: #fff; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #000 solid; padding-bottom: 2px; } Example 3 shows what this looks like in practice. Location, Location, Location To take this example to it’s natural conclusion, you can add an id of current (or something similar) in appropriate places in your navigation, specify a full set of link styles for current, and have a navigation which, at a glance, lets users know which page or section they’re currently in. Example navigation using location indicators. and the source code Conclusion All the examples here are intended to illustrate the concepts, and should not be taken as the absolute best way to format links or style navigation bars – that’s up to you and whatever visual design you’re using at the time. They’re also not the only things you should be doing to make your site accessible. Above all, remember that accessibility is for life, not just for Christmas.",2007,Ann McMeekin,annmcmeekin,2007-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/css-for-accessibility/,design 151,Get In Shape,"Pop quiz: what’s wrong with the following navigation? Maybe nothing. But then again, maybe there’s something bugging you about the way it comes together, something you can’t quite put your finger on. It seems well-designed, but it also seems a little… off. The design decisions that led to this eventual form were no doubt well-considered: Client: The top level needs to have a “current page” status indicator of some sort. Designer: How about a white tab? Client: Great! The second level needs to show up underneath the first level though… Designer: Okay, but that white tab I just added makes it hard to visually connect the bottom nav to the top. Client: Too late, we’ve seen the white tab and we love it. Try and make it work. Designer: Right. So I placed the second level in its own box. Client: Hmm. They seem too separated. I can’t tell that the yellow nav is the second level of the first. Designer: How about an indicator arrow? Client: Brilliant! The problem is that the end result feels awkward and forced. During the design process, little decisions were made that ultimately affect the overall shape of the navigation. What started out as a neatly contained rounded rectangle ended up as an ambiguous double shape that looks funny, though it’s often hard to pinpoint precisely why. The Shape of Things Well the why in this case is because seemingly unrelated elements in a design still end up visually interacting. Adding a new item to a page impacts everything surrounding it. In this navigation example, we’re looking at two individual objects that are close enough to each other that they form a relationship; if we reduce them to strictly their outlines, it’s a little easier to see that this particular combination registers oddly. The two shapes float with nothing really grounding them. If they were connected, perhaps it would be a different story. The white tab divides the top shape in half, leaving a gap in the middle of it. There’s very little balance in this pairing because the overall shape of the navigation wasn’t considered during the design process. Here’s another example: Gmail. Great email client, but did you ever closely look at what’s going on in that left hand navigation? The continuous blue bar around the message area spills out into the navigation. If we remove all text, we’re left with this odd configuration: Though the reasoning for anchoring the navigation highlight against the message area might be sound, the result is an irregular shape that doesn’t correspond with anything in reality. You may never consciously notice it, but once you do it’s hard to miss. One other example courtesy of last.fm: The two header areas are the same shade of pink so they appear to be closely connected. When reduced to their outlines it’s easy to see that this combination is off-balance: the edges don’t align, the sharp corners of the top shape aren’t consistent with the rounded corners of the bottom, and the part jutting out on the right of the bottom one seems fairly random. The result is a duo of oddly mis-matched shapes. Design Strategies Our minds tend to pick out familiar patterns. A clever designer can exploit this by creating references in his or her work to shapes and combinations with which viewers are already familiar. There are a few simple ideas that can be employed to help you achieve this: consistency, balance, and completion. Consistency A fairly simple way to unify the various disparate shapes on a page is by designing them with a certain amount of internal consistency. You don’t need to apply an identical size, colour, border, or corner treatment to every single shape; devolving a design into boring repetition isn’t what we’re after here. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to apply a set of common rules to most shapes within your work. Consider purevolume and its multiple rounded-corner panels. From the bottom of the site’s main navigation to the grey “Extras” panels halfway down the page (shown above), multiple shapes use a common border radius for unity. Different colours, different sizes, different content, but the consistent outlines create a strong sense of similarity. Not that every shape on the site follows this rule; they break the pattern right at the top with a darker sharp-cornered header, and again with the thumbnails below. But the design remains unified, nonetheless. Balance Arguably the biggest problem with the last.fm example earlier is one of balance. The area poking out of the bottom shape created a fairly obvious imbalance for no apparent reason. The right hand side is visually emphasized due to the greater area of pink coverage, but with the white gap left beside it, the emphasis seems unwarranted. It’s possible to create tension in your design by mismatching shapes and throwing off the balance, but when that happens unintentionally it can look like a mistake. Above are a few examples of design elements in balanced and unbalanced configurations. The examples in the top row are undeniably more pleasing to the eye than those in the bottom row. If these were fleshed out into full designs, those derived from the templates in the top row would naturally result in stronger work. Take a look at the header on 9Rules for a study in well-considered balance. On the left you’ll see a couple of paragraphs of text, on the right you have floating navigational items, and both flank the site’s logo. This unusual layout combines multiple design elements that look nothing alike, and places them together in a way that anchors each so that no one weighs down the header. Completion And finally we come to the idea of completion. Shapes don’t necessarily need hard outlines to be read visually as shapes, which can be exploited for various purposes. Notice how Zend’s mid-page “Business Topics” and “News” items (below) fade out to the right and bottom, but the placement of two of these side-by-side creates an impression of two panels rather than three disparate floating columns. By allowing the viewer’s eye to complete the shapes, they’ve lightened up the design of the page and removed inessential lines. In a busy design this technique could prove quite handy. Along the same lines, the individual shapes within your design may also be combined visually to form outlines of larger shapes. The differently-coloured header and main content/sidebar shapes on Veerle’s blog come together to form a single central panel, further emphasized by the slight drop shadow to the right. Implementation Studying how shape can be used effectively in design is simply a starting point. As with all things design-related, there are no hard and fast rules here; ultimately you may choose to bring these principles into your work more often, or break them for effect. But understanding how shapes interact within a page, and how that effect is ultimately perceived by viewers, is a key design principle you can use to impress your friends.",2007,Dave Shea,daveshea,2007-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/get-in-shape/,design 148,Typesetting Tables,"Tables have suffered in recent years on the web. They were used for laying out web pages. Then, following the Web Standards movement, they’ve been renamed by the populous as `data tables’ to ensure that we all know what they’re for. There have been some great tutorials for the designing tables using CSS for presentation and focussing on the semantics in the displaying of data in the correct way. However, typesetting tables is a subtle craft that has hardly had a mention. Table design can often end up being a technical exercise. What data do we need to display? Where is the data coming from and what form will it take? When was the last time your heard someone talk about lining numerals? Or designing to the reading direction? Tables are not read like sentences When a reader looks at, and tries to understand, tabular data, they’re doing a bunch of things at the same time. Generally, they’re task based; they’re looking for something. They are reading horizontally AND vertically Reading a table is not like reading a paragraph in a novel, and therefore shouldn’t be typeset in the same way. Designing tables is information design, it’s functional typography—it’s not a time for eye candy. Typesetting tables Typesetting great looking tables is largely an exercise in restraint. Minimal interference with the legibility of the table should be in the forefront of any designers mind. When I’m designing tables I apply some simple rules: Plenty of negative space Use the right typeface Go easy on the background tones, unless you’re giving reading direction visual emphasis Design to the reading direction By way of explanation, here are those rules as applied to the following badly typeset table. Your default table This table is a mess. There is no consideration for the person trying to read it. Everything is too tight. The typeface is wrong. It’s flat. A grim table indeed. Let’s see what we can do about that. Plenty of negative space The badly typeset table has been set with default padding. There has been little consideration for the ascenders and descenders in the type interfering with the many horizontal rules. The first thing we do is remove most of the lines, or rules. You don’t need them – the data in the rows forms its own visual rules. Now, with most of the rules removed, the ones that remain mean something; they are indicating some kind of hierarchy to the help the reader understand what the different table elements mean – in this case the column headings. Now we need to give the columns and rows more negative space. Note the framing of the column headings. I’m giving them more room at the bottom. This negative space is active—it’s empty for a reason. The extra air in here also gives more hierarchy to the column headings. Use the right typeface The default table is set in a serif typeface. This isn’t ideal for a couple of reasons. This serif typeface has a standard set of text numerals. These dip below the baseline and are designed for using figures within text, not on their own. What you need to use is a typeface with lining numerals. These align to the baseline and are more legible when used for tables. Sans serif typefaces generally have lining numerals. They are also arguably more legible when used in tables. Go easy on the background tones, unless you’re giving reading direction visual emphasis We’ve all seen background tones on tables. They have their use, but my feeling is that use should be functional and not decorative. If you have a table that is long, but only a few columns wide, then alternate row shading isn’t that useful for showing the different lines of data. It’s a common misconception that alternate row shading is to increase legibility on long tables. That’s not the case. Shaded rows are to aid horizontal reading across multiple table columns. On wide tables they are incredibly useful for helping the reader find what they want. Background tone can also be used to give emphasis to the reading direction. If we want to emphasis a column, that can be given a background tone. Hierarchy As I said earlier, people may be reading a table vertically, and horizontally in order to find what they want. Sometimes, especially if the table is complex, we need to give them a helping hand. Visually emphasising the hierarchy in tables can help the reader scan the data. Column headings are particularly important. Column headings are often what a reader will go to first, so we need to help them understand that the column headings are different to the stuff beneath them, and we also need to give them more visual importance. We can do this by making them bold, giving them ample negative space, or by including a thick rule above them. We can also give the row titles the same level of emphasis. In addition to background tones, you can give emphasis to reading direction by typesetting those elements in bold. You shouldn’t use italics—with sans serif typefaces the difference is too subtle. So, there you have it. A couple of simple guidelines to make your tables cleaner and more readable.",2007,Mark Boulton,markboulton,2007-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/typesetting-tables/,design 146,Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix,"Web pages built in plain old HTML and CSS are displayed using only the fonts installed on users’ computers (@font-face implementations excepted). To enable this, CSS provides the font-family property for specifying fonts in order of preference (often known as a font stack). For example: h1 {font-family: 'Egyptienne F', Cambria, Georgia, serif} So in the above rule, headings will be displayed in Egyptienne F. If Egyptienne F is not available then Cambria will be used, failing that Georgia or the final fallback default serif font. This everyday bit of CSS will be common knowledge among all 24 ways readers. It is also a commonly held belief that the only fonts we can rely on being installed on users’ computers are the core web fonts of Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia and friends. But is that really true? If you look in the fonts folder of your computer, or even your Mum’s computer, then you are likely to find a whole load of fonts besides the core ones. This is because many software packages automatically install extra typefaces. For example, Office 2003 installs over 100 additional fonts. Admittedly not all of these fonts are particularly refined, and not all are suitable for the Web. However they still do increase your options. The Matrix I have put together a matrix of (western) fonts showing which are installed with Mac and Windows operating systems, which are installed with various versions of Microsoft Office, and which are installed with Adobe Creative Suite. The matrix is available for download as an Excel file and as a CSV. There are no readily available statistics regarding the penetration of Office or Creative Suite, but you can probably take an educated guess based on your knowledge of your readers. The idea of the matrix is that use can use it to help construct your font stack. First of all pick the font you’d really like for your text – this doesn’t have to be in the matrix. Then pick the generic family (serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy or monospace) and a font from each of the operating systems. Then pick any suitable fonts from the Office and Creative Suite lists. For example, you may decide your headings should be in the increasingly ubiquitous Clarendon. This is a serif type face. At OS-level the most similar is arguably Georgia. Adobe CS2 comes with Century Old Style which has a similar feel. Century Schoolbook is similar too, and is installed with all versions of Office. Based on this your font stack becomes: font-family: 'Clarendon Std', 'Century Old Style Std', 'Century Schoolbook', Georgia, serif Note the ‘Std’ suffix indicating a ‘standard’ OpenType file, which will normally be your best bet for more esoteric fonts. I’m not suggesting the process of choosing suitable fonts is an easy one. Firstly there are nearly two hundred fonts in the matrix, so learning what each font looks like is tricky and potentially time consuming (if you haven’t got all the fonts installed on a machine to hand you’ll be doing a lot of Googling for previews). And it’s not just as simple as choosing fonts that look similar or have related typographic backgrounds, they need to have similar metrics as well, This is especially true in terms of x-height which gives an indication of how big or small a font looks. Over to You The main point of all this is that there are potentially more fonts to consider than is generally accepted, so branch out a little (carefully and tastefully) and bring a little variety to sites out there. If you come up with any novel font stacks based on this approach, please do blog them (tagged as per the footer) and at some point they could all be combined in one place for everyone to consider. Appendix What about Linux? The only operating systems in the matrix are those from Microsoft and Apple. For completeness, Linux operating systems should be included too, although these are many and varied and very much in a minority, so I omitted them for time being. For the record, some Linux distributions come packaged with Microsoft’s core fonts. Others use the Vera family, and others use the Liberation family which comprises fonts metrically identical to Times New Roman and Arial. Sources The sources of font information for the matrix are as follows: Windows XP SP2 Windows Vista Office 2003 Office 2007 Mac OSX Tiger Mac OSX Leopard (scroll down two thirds) Office 2004 (Mac) by inspecting my Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Fonts folder Office 2008 (Mac) is expected to be as Office 2004 with the addition of the Vista ClearType fonts Creative Suite 2 (see pdf link in first comment) Creative Suite 3",2007,Richard Rutter,richardrutter,2007-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/increase-your-font-stacks-with-font-matrix/,design 149,Underpants Over My Trousers,"With Christmas approaching faster than a speeding bullet, this is the perfect time for you to think about that last minute present to buy for the web geek in your life. If you’re stuck for ideas for that special someone, forget about that svelte iPhone case carved from solid mahogany and head instead to your nearest comic-book shop and pick up a selection of comics or graphic novels. (I’ll be using some of my personal favourite comic books as examples throughout). Trust me, whether your nearest and dearest has been reading comics for a while or has never peered inside this four-colour world, they’ll thank-you for it. Aside from indulging their superhero fantasies, comic books can provide web designers with a rich vein of inspiring ideas and material to help them create shirt button popping, trouser bursting work for the web. I know from my own personal experience, that looking at aspects of comic book design, layout and conventions and thinking about the ways that they can inform web design has taken my design work in often-unexpected directions. There are far too many fascinating facets of comic book design that provide web designers with inspiration to cover in the time that it takes to pull your underpants over your trousers. So I’m going to concentrate on one muscle bound aspect of comic design, one that will make you think differently about how you lay out the content of your pages in panels. A suitcase full of Kryptonite Now, to the uninitiated onlooker, the panels of a comic book may appear to perform a similar function to still frames from a movie. But inside the pages of a comic, panels must work harder to help the reader understand the timing of a story. It is this method for conveying narrative timing to a reader that I believe can be highly useful to designers who work on the web as timing, drama and suspense are as important in the web world as they are in worlds occupied by costumed crime fighters and superheroes. I’d like you to start by closing your eyes and thinking about your own process for laying out panels of content on a page. OK, you’ll actually be better off with your eyes open if you’re going to carry on reading. I’ll bet you a suitcase full of Kryptonite that you often, if not always, structure your page layouts, and decide on the dimensions of those panels according to either: The base grid that you are working to The Golden Ratio or another mathematical schema More likely, I bet that you decide on the size and the number of your panels based on the amount of content that will be going into them. From today, I’d like you to think about taking a different approach. This approach not only addresses horizontal and vertical space, but also adds the dimension of time to your designs. Slowing down the action A comic book panel not only acts as a container for its content but also indicates to a reader how much time passes within the panel and as a result, how much time the reader should focus their attention on that one panel. Smaller panels create swift eye movement and shorter bursts of attention. Larger panels give the perception of more time elapsing in the story and subconsciously demands that a reader devotes more time to focus on it. Concrete by Paul Chadwick (Dark Horse Comics) This use of panel dimensions to control timing can also be useful for web designers in designing the reading/user experience. Imagine a page full of information about a product or service. You’ll naturally want the reader to focus for longer on the key benefits of your offering rather than perhaps its technical specifications. Now take a look at this spread of pages from Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Diamond Comic Distributors 2004) Throughout this series of (originally) twelve editions, artist Dave Gibbons stuck rigidly to his 3×3 panels per page design and deviated from it only for dramatic moments within the narrative. In particular during the last few pages of chapter eleven, Gibbons adds weight to the impending doom by slowing down the action by using larger panels and forces the reader to think longer about what was coming next. The action then speeds up through twelve smaller panels until the final panel: nothing more than white space and yet one of the most iconic and thought provoking in the entire twelve book series. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Diamond Comic Distributors 2004) On the web it is common for clients to ask designers to fill every pixel of screen space with content, perhaps not understanding the drama that can be added by nothing more than white space. In the final chapter, Gibbons emphasises the carnage that has taken place (unseen between chapters eleven and twelve) by presenting the reader with six full pages containing only single, large panels. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Diamond Comic Distributors 2004) This drama, created by the artist’s use of panel dimensions to control timing, is a technique that web designers can also usefully employ when emphasising important areas of content. Think back for a moment to the home page of Apple Inc., during the launch of their iconic iPhone, where the page contained nothing more than a large image and the phrase “Say hello to iPhone”. Rather than fill the page with sales messages, Apple’s designers allowed the space itself to tell the story and created a real sense of suspense and expectation among their readers. Borders Whereas on the web, panel borders are commonly used to add emphasis to particular areas of content, in comic books they take on a different and sometimes opposite role. In the examples so far, borders have contained all of the action. Removing a border can have the opposite effect to what you might at first think. Rather than taking emphasis away from their content, in comics, borderless panels allow the reader’s eyes to linger for longer on the content adding even stronger emphasis. Concrete by Paul Chadwick (Dark Horse Comics) This effect is amplified when the borderless content is allowed to bleed to the edges of a page. Because the content is no longer confined, except by the edges of the page (both comic and web) the reader’s eye is left to wander out into open space. Concrete by Paul Chadwick (Dark Horse Comics) This type of open, borderless content panel can be highly useful in placing emphasis on the most important content on a page in exactly the very opposite way that we commonly employ on the web today. So why is time an important dimension to think about when designing your web pages? On one level, we are often already concerned with the short attention spans of visitors to our pages and should work hard to allow them to quickly and easily find and read the content that both they and we think is important. Learning lessons from comic book timing can only help us improve that experience. On another: timing, suspense and drama are already everyday parts of the web browsing experience. Will a reader see what they expect when they click from one page to the next? Or are they in for a surprise? Most importantly, I believe that the web, like comics, is about story telling: often the story of the experiences that a customer will have when they use our product or service or interact with our organisation. It is this element of story telling than can be greatly improved by learning from comics. It is exactly this kind of learning and adapting from older, more established and at first glance unrelated media that you will find can make a real distinctive difference to the design work that you create. Fill your stockings If you’re a visual designer or developer and are not a regular reader of comics, from the moment that you pick up your first title, I know that you will find them inspiring. I will be writing more, and speaking about comic design applied to the web at several (to be announced) events this coming year. I hope you’ll be slipping your underpants over your trousers and joining me then. In the meantime, here is some further reading to pick up on your next visit to a comic book or regular bookshop and slip into your stockings: Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner (Northern Light Books 2001) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (Harper Collins 1994) Have a happy superhero season. (I would like to thank all of the talented artists, writers and publishers whose work I have used as examples in this article and the hundreds more who inspire me every day with their tall tales and talent.)",2007,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2007-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/underpants-over-my-trousers/,design