What do you think?
Rate this book
Typographic Web Design: How to Think Like a Typographer in HTML and CSS
Learn how to use typography on the web
Typography has long been an invaluable tool for communicating ideas and information. Words and characters once impressed in clay, written on papyrus, and printed with ink are now manifest in pixels of light. Today's web typographers can help their readers find, understand, and connect with the words, ideas, and information they seek.
Thus, legibility and readability are the foundations for the typographic theories and practice covered in Typographic Web Design. You'll learn how to choose fonts, organize information, create a system of hierarchy, work with tabular information, create a grid, apply a typographic system across multiple pages, and build a font library.
Each chapter provides time-tested typography rules to follow (modified for the web), explains why they work, when to break them, and offers the opportunity to test the rules with hands-on exercises in HTML and CSS. If you don't know HTML and CSS, Typographic Web Design provides a walk-through for each lesson, showing you how to plan and write syntax. Readers are sure to come away with an understanding of typographic principles, as well as the HTML and CSS skills needed to implement them on the web. Typographic Web Design
•Applies decades of typographic theory and practice (e.g., how to choose a font) directly to web design (e.g., how to use the @font-face property in CSS).
•Clearly explains all typographic rules presented, providing examples that contrast successful and less successful typographic solutions.
•Is written for visual thinkers. The book is supported by a web site with solutions, critiques, and revisions for each lesson. Laura Franz is an Associate Professor of Design at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she has taught web typography for 12 years. She has presented lectures and workshops on Typographic Web Design, and has written a course on the topic for Lynda.com.
Typography has long been an invaluable tool for communicating ideas and information. Words and characters once impressed in clay, written on papyrus, and printed with ink are now manifest in pixels of light. Today's web typographers can help their readers find, understand, and connect with the words, ideas, and information they seek.
Thus, legibility and readability are the foundations for the typographic theories and practice covered in Typographic Web Design. You'll learn how to choose fonts, organize information, create a system of hierarchy, work with tabular information, create a grid, apply a typographic system across multiple pages, and build a font library.
Each chapter provides time-tested typography rules to follow (modified for the web), explains why they work, when to break them, and offers the opportunity to test the rules with hands-on exercises in HTML and CSS. If you don't know HTML and CSS, Typographic Web Design provides a walk-through for each lesson, showing you how to plan and write syntax. Readers are sure to come away with an understanding of typographic principles, as well as the HTML and CSS skills needed to implement them on the web. Typographic Web Design
•Applies decades of typographic theory and practice (e.g., how to choose a font) directly to web design (e.g., how to use the @font-face property in CSS).
•Clearly explains all typographic rules presented, providing examples that contrast successful and less successful typographic solutions.
•Is written for visual thinkers. The book is supported by a web site with solutions, critiques, and revisions for each lesson. Laura Franz is an Associate Professor of Design at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she has taught web typography for 12 years. She has presented lectures and workshops on Typographic Web Design, and has written a course on the topic for Lynda.com.
336 pages, Paperback
First published October 18, 2011
2 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 28, 2012
In the pre-PC era, I worked for a high-end typography shop charging $150/hour for my time. We handled all the best ad agencies and did work for the likes of Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines. For years I could not even read for pleasure because I was so focused on minute differences in kerning. My design skills were limited, too, to static black-and-white print ads that emphasized typography over content. When the world shifted to massive consumption of web-based information, I had to just close my eyes to it all and let go. That is, until I picked up a copy of Typographic Web Design: How to Think Like a Typographer in HTML and CSS.
When I first skimmed through Laura Franz' book, I felt that flutter of joy I used to feel when working with beautiful type. The book itself is inviting enough to be a coffee table book. I mean, really. The major parts are prefaced by colored pages with short quotations to entice the reader into the following chapters. The book is very well organized, with lessons at the end of each chapter. The lessons, which build on each other, manage to teach typography, design, and HTML/CSS coding in a very clear and accessible way. The concepts are very well illustrated, and Franz is an awesome teacher. The book lends itself to a number of different learning styles. I am a conceptual learner, more inclined to develop skill after first glomming onto a gestalt, so I skimmed first, then went back through reading the text in more depth. I will return to the lessons when I feel ready to redesign the Content Management System (CMS)-based template we are now using with our FutureCycle Press web site, but those who learn best from a step-by-step hand-held approach will want to do the lessons as they are encountered.
Other than being a rusty typographer, I am only a self-taught designer: again, one whose head hurt so badly when considering how little control I had over web-based material that I gave up trying to do anything special at all. So far, it's been all I could do just to get our poetry ebooks programmed for the Kindle—and this book even helped me imagine better ways to do that. Now, too, thanks to Franz' deft command of the beast, a lightbulb has gone off in my brain. One concept alone (that a web template and a design grid are not the same thing) and its implications as explored in this book were worth its price. (Sounds simple, I know, but I never got it before.) I highly recommend it!
When I first skimmed through Laura Franz' book, I felt that flutter of joy I used to feel when working with beautiful type. The book itself is inviting enough to be a coffee table book. I mean, really. The major parts are prefaced by colored pages with short quotations to entice the reader into the following chapters. The book is very well organized, with lessons at the end of each chapter. The lessons, which build on each other, manage to teach typography, design, and HTML/CSS coding in a very clear and accessible way. The concepts are very well illustrated, and Franz is an awesome teacher. The book lends itself to a number of different learning styles. I am a conceptual learner, more inclined to develop skill after first glomming onto a gestalt, so I skimmed first, then went back through reading the text in more depth. I will return to the lessons when I feel ready to redesign the Content Management System (CMS)-based template we are now using with our FutureCycle Press web site, but those who learn best from a step-by-step hand-held approach will want to do the lessons as they are encountered.
Other than being a rusty typographer, I am only a self-taught designer: again, one whose head hurt so badly when considering how little control I had over web-based material that I gave up trying to do anything special at all. So far, it's been all I could do just to get our poetry ebooks programmed for the Kindle—and this book even helped me imagine better ways to do that. Now, too, thanks to Franz' deft command of the beast, a lightbulb has gone off in my brain. One concept alone (that a web template and a design grid are not the same thing) and its implications as explored in this book were worth its price. (Sounds simple, I know, but I never got it before.) I highly recommend it!
November 7, 2025
This is probably just me, but I found the choice of typeface distracting (Argh - those xs!), and the varying quality of the screenshots in the text was frustrating. Content was pretty good, but it would have been nice to see some examples using some of the modern typography tools available with Sass/Compass.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews