Typography & Web Design

Whether you realize it or not, your typography helps to create an experience for users before they’ve even read a word or clicked a button. First impressions are lasting impressions. Typography has the potential to go beyond merely telling a story — it shows the user who is behind the website and what you’re about. The treatment of type creates an atmosphere and elicits a response much the same way as tone of voice does.

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites:

“Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him”

With some imagination (replace print with online) this sounds like the job description of a web designer. It is the web designer’s task “to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of web content in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him”.