Typography & Graphic Design Blog
There is a great article over on Smashing Magazine called Choosing a Responsive Image Solution that has a fair amount of commenting going on. The whole image and page weight conundrum and the swirling circus of slippery solutions for these problematic areas of responsive web design is reaching towards a tipping point, in my opinion. Yes, people are being weeded out of the web design business, but for those that remain, if the current paradigm holds, things will never be the same. I shared a comment on this article I want to share here:
I remember not too long ago when web design was fun. None of this is fun anymore. It takes half-a-dozen js libraries on top of some flavor of HTML5 boilerplate – all before you even look at a CMS – to get going with responsive design. It’s more like we are crossing the threshold into a new paradigm were fully-baked software platforms will have to create and manage website development. It’s getting to the point where making a website is like coding an illustration by hand in SVG, or coding a PDF in PostScript by hand. Sure you can do it, but those technologies, especially PostScript, made fully-baked IDEs for creating documents based on it a sure necessity. Where is the Quark, PageMaker, InDesign, Illustrator for websites going to come from? Does Adobe have anything up their sleeves? And if you flip over to app development – man that sure looks a lot more fun by comparison! I think my philosophical waxing about responsive web design was finally terminated by the all-of-them-are-too-complicated solutions around images. Or rather, they are too-complicated to be *fun*…You may agree or disagree — that’s fine. The point is that the technical complications and wavy-gravy permutations of web design solutions, in 2013, are seriously unfun and a big killjoy to what used to be a process more like building with Lego bricks, which shall forever remain FUN. After 18 years doing web design, I wish it was more like Legos again. Like it used to be 🙁
“What is original and dynamic today, will be yesterday’s design tomorrow. New and innovative typography does not necessarily replace existing forms of typographic expression, but supplements them and thereby enriches the world of typography. Learn to appreciate all forms of typography, determining for yourself what is appropriate for specific projects.”—James Craig, Designing with Type
“If there is an essential truism in typesetting, it is that a page contains no voids, only spaces between printed elements. The essence of typesetting is regulating the size of those spaces to control the balance and rhythm between black and white. This is the key to a graphically harmonious page—one with good type color—as well as to text that is pleasing and easy to read.”—James Felici, The Complete Manual of Typography
“Typography is known as an invisible art, because if a typographer has done a good job and produced a page that flows and is ‘easy on the eye’, he has done his job and the reader doesn’t notice. A page that is badly designed will be difficult and irritating to read. Whether you are reading in the office for work, or at home for pleasure, and no matter how interesting the actual content , if a book is uncomfortable on the eye then the enjoyment of reading is spoiled.”—Jim Williams, Type Matters!