Over the past two months, I’ve highlighted some major changes developing
in web-based typography, and while it’s exciting, these new advances bring greater expectations of the web designer.

The widespread support of font embedding was a major feat, but it definitely raises the bar for us. Those traditional typography principles that we apply in print design are missing in the bare bones CSS of so many sites (and mine is no exception). It’s becoming harder to blame code and browser limitations for mediocre typography with so many new developments. In fact now that we can set a site in a beautiful font like FF Tisa, the lack of some fundamental type principles almost seems glaring.

So for those of you wanting to tighten up your web typography, The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web is an awesome resource. Robert Bringhurst’s “Typography Bible” has been translated to the web, for web type purposes, one principle at a time which is no small endeavor. Currently, the creators have only beefed out one full principle, Rhythm & Proportion, but there’s a wealth of good information in that alone.

Now if I could just find the time to give my own site a lil type kick in the arse…

An example from The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web