ter picture framer carving a new frame without knowing what the painting looks like, only

that it’s about 3 by 2 feet and has some red in it. While it can be done—and maybe even

done well if the framer guesses right—the end product will not be anywhere close to its

potential without understanding the context of the art.

To execute the best possible work, designers and developers need the full story, and that

means real content. Too often, clients, marketing departments, and writers instruct

graphic artists to “just ‘greek’ in the text.”3 While designers might have a general idea of

what the site needs to convey in its look and feel, it’s still just a shot in the dark.

Typography considerations

The world of typography on the Web has a murky, sordid past, filled with inconsistent

browser rendering, poorly aliased text, cross-platform font discrepancies, and the unpre-

dictable text-resizing whims of users. This trail of frustration is, thankfully, slowly subsiding.

Today, the tools are better than just a few years ago, and as technology marches forward,

some of the maddening variables of early web design have stabilized into a few concrete

guidelines.

To serif or to sans?

The question over whether to use serif or sans serif fonts in body copy is actually a fairly

interesting debate. In the web design world, it has become an accepted precept that sans

serif fonts are better for condensed body copy, and in the world of print, serif fonts are

better for longer passages of type. This is, however, a myth that has yet to be proved con-

clusively either way, but you can see an example of the difference in Figure 2-2.

3. The term greek is technically false (lorem ipsum is Latin), but it has been slowly converted into a

slang verb by thousands of designers and marketing folk looking to quickly fill a block of

content without actual text.

31

WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES

Figure 2-2. The text on the right could appear on a website; the text on the left is formatted

for print.

Several studies have been conducted, all of them producing virtually imperceptible,

almost anecdotal evidence supporting both arguments. For typography on the Web, we

can deduce the following:

In general, people prefer serif fonts when they were sized higher than normal,