The sharing spirit in the design community is remarkable. Designers spend countless hours on side projects and without asking for anything in return, they share their creations freely with the community. Just to give something back, to inspire and to support fellow folks in their work.
When working on a project yourself, freebies like these can come to the rescue when you have to get along on a tight budget, but, more often that that, they simply are the missing piece that’ll make your design complete.
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Editor’s Note:Today we are pleased to feature the new and free font families Yrsa and Rasa by David Březina and Anna Giedryś and their story behind the design process.Yrsa and Rasa are two open-source type families published by Rosetta with generous financial support from Google. The fonts support over 92 languages in Latin script and 2 languages in Gujarati script. The family currently has 5 weights. They were designed and produced by Anna Giedryś and me and they are now released and ready for download.
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It’s the small details that make a project shine. Solid typography, well-crafted with attention and care is one of them. A harmonious visual rhythm, typographic subtleties like soft caps, margin outdents or the correct use of hyphens and dashes — there are a lot of things that add up to it.
In practice, however, publishing on the web is supposed to be fast, and the little details are often overlooked, which is a pity, because they are not only pleasing to the eye but also improve the reading experience.
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Typography can make all the difference. However, if your project has to get along on a very limited budget and you need to rely on free fonts, good ones are never easy to find. Luckily, we stumbled across some real gems lately.
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Microsoft restarted conversations about system UI fonts with its original Windows Phone design language, which relied heavily on typography in general, and on a font named Segoe in particular. No wonder that the idea of using those fonts is spreading through the web world as well. Whether you want your website to feel more like an app, to draw clearer lines between the content and user interface, or to use modern, beautiful fonts with zero latency, you might be interested in using system UI fonts on your website. But it’s not as easy as it could be. That’s because the CSS support is curiously schizophrenic.
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Did you ever take a walk through the entire Unicode table? It’s the history of our civilization expressed in typography. It might be organized in an arbitrary fashion and not explained well, but it’s all here: languages, cultures, concepts. Spaces are here, too. There’s the one with an agent good enough to have gotten it the biggest key on everyone’s keyboard, but there are many more: the very narrow hair and thin spaces, the super-wide en and em spaces, and a few others in between. Let’s find out what other space characters there are, what their heritage is, and how they can be useful today.
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Have usability conventions and the web’s universality steered us away from proper art direction? Have we forgotten about art direction altogether? Marko Dugonjić believes so. As designers, we can achieve much more with type, and with just a little more thought and creativity, we can finally start to take full advantage of the type systems available. Let’s look at ways we can push typographic design on the web further, beyond the status quo of today.
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One of the important factors in a customer’s decision of whether to use a product is usually the brand’s visual presence, which can help a product stand out from the rest of what the market has to offer. Upon taking a closer look, it doesn’t take long to see that good typography is involved. Akira Kobayashi believes that good typography reinforces the meaning of the text. He has a background in art and calligraphy and has been a freelance type designer for 18 years.
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One could easily argue that nothing affects a design more than typography. And good typography starts with choosing an appropriate typeface. But can having too much choice be a bad thing? In this article, Jeremiah Shoaf reviews a collection of beautiful websites and analyzes the impact that their designers’ typeface choices have had on the overall designs. She’ll critique both the good and the bad. Of course, type is subjective, so take any critiques with a grain of salt. Let’s dig in!
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While a good measure does improve the reading experience, it’s only one rule for good typography. Another rule is to maintain a comfortable font size. Designing on a desktop or laptop browser means that we are spending most of our time at an arm’s length from the text, and we don’t spend much time seeing how the text renders on small devices. A good font size (not too small) is readable. A good font size (not too big) promotes horizontal eye motion. A good font size with the proper line height will help your readers find what they’re looking for.
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