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.

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CONTENT

Insist on copy—refute lorem ipsum

Designers everywhere have a familiar friend in ancient Latin text. For hundreds of years,

Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum has provided printers and designers a content

doppelganger: the infamous passage containing the words lorem ipsum. This once obscure

text now finds its way into countless design projects as meaningless filler copy. It suppos-

edly approximates typical character distribution in an average passage of English text, and 2

is intended to force the viewer’s eyes to focus on the design of the text without getting

hung up on the actual words.

While the technique has merit—especially when testing typefaces—designing a website

without real content does a disservice to everyone, especially the designer. Imagine a mas-