It just so it happens that a designer I know would like to design his own website (and I would do the code and content management). Here are a few things he needs to know before he starts on the drafts as a few things work differently on the web compared to paper.
A bit like when I first started sewing it felt that the forms I cut changed depending on how I held them in my hand. I was used to working with paper. When I started creating websites I had to learn again that certain things were beyond my control.
Texts
Unlike in print where the pictures and texts are projected in the exact position, size, distances, fonts onto the paper for everyone to see in the same way, things are different on a website.
As it is the browser on the computer of the viewer to “produce” the web page, the display depends on
a) type of brower
b) settings of the computer (e.g. screen resolution)
c) monitor size
d) fonts installed on the computer
e) text size
f) zoom
This means that the running text really goes ‘running’.
Fonts
Running text on screen is best read when non-serif, although many blogs are now coded in serifs. The most common fonts (which most people have installed on their computers) are:
Arial
Courier New
Georgia (non-serif – good for titles – see Guardian)
Helvetica (not rendering well on my computer, though)
Times New Roman (non-serif – default font – I hate it on websites)
Trebuchet MS (very much loved by my dyslexic Flash teacher)
Verdana
Webdings (thingies)
So web designers opt for one of the non-serifs above and use a picture for the ‘unusual’ fonts in the logo, e.g. www.govinda-express.com. Also for SEO (search engine optimisation) it is best to have all texts as texts and not as pictures, in particlar for titles and the navigation links.
Now Goole has come up with a facility where the browser temporarily uploads a font file so that it reads the text the way the web designer had intended. The fonts we can use in this way are the following in the Google font directory…
Design
Mostly we work with columns and boxes and quite intricate things can be made, e.g. guardian.co.uk/environment
But we have to be aware that the boxes run downwards independently, at their own speed, i.e. depending on the length of the individual texts.
