Typographic Web Design

Most - if not all - website designs are composed of images, a variety of colors, some brushes, and then effects. After all, web designing is a "visual" art, it only seems proper to have an accompanying image in whatever design you create. But did you know that even without any image of any kind, you can still create a sleek and beautiful layout?

First you have to take in mind that web designing is merely the art of layouting - basically, it’s the same with what you do when layout magazines, books, or publications. If you noticed, these mediums make use of images when their layouts are being designed as well; but sometimes, the design would suffice even without even the smallest bit of an image. What do they make use of? Simple: typography.

Typography is the under-appreciated art of letters and their designs. The voluptuous curves of script fonts, the modern sleekness of sans-serif fonts, and the traditional ye olden days feelings exuded by Serif ones such as Times New Roman. Believe it or not, typography can stand alone as a design without support of images, be it in print or web or any other medium. Even without colors, typography would work as a design; in fact, its impact is actually stronger when used as black and white layouts.

There are lots of tutorials on the web on how to do different kinds of thing to a website to make it look prettier: use CSS, have a welcome notification, creating a flash toolbar, and all those other stuff, but a website is a website - you can do everything to it to make it look better, but its main purpose is still to convey information to the world.

Visitors carry the same thought; once it all comes down to it and layouts and designs are given a quick 10-second glance of your Sitegrinder layout, the visitors almost always focus on the text. That’s because the text carries mostly all of the information a site aims to provide, with a few exceptions like flash game pages and the like. Sure, the layout of the design is what attracts them, but it’s the text, and its content, that keeps them spellbound to your site.

Some things to keep in mind, though. Don’t go for using obscure downloaded fonts that strike you fancy. Sure, they may look spectacular on your computer, but what about other people’s computers? Most of them do not have the font installed in them, so in a good day about 3 out of 50 of your visitors would be the only ones who could view your site properly.

Use fonts that require no downloading and come with the installation of your Operating System, so there is a good chance that other people will be able to see it. Try using many normal fonts in different ways, so that you are able to maximize their efficacy. Better yet, if you really want that font so badly to be in your site, just put it there as an image and use Sitegrinder code so that everybody can see it.

Sitegrinder
Contains tutorials and such on building your own website from Photoshop without any manual coding.