Last year, 2011, was the year that Web typography finally came of age as Web fonts have grown in popularity. The history of Web design has been full of inspiration and innovation, but little of that has been around typography, in large part due to the lack of font choices available.

To be sure, typography is about far more than just the font, but when you only have five fonts to choose from for most of your work, imagine a culinary world where you could only choose from five ingredients. Here are some typography trends for your inspiration.

Mixing Font Weights

A lot of Web designers I meet think that “bold” is the font weight, but bold is actually afont weight. Although certainly the most common, bold is not the only weight available for fonts. There are also thin, light, medium, heavy, black and many others. For example, the Neue Helvetica® design includes weights ranging from ultra light to black.

Dingbats Instead of Images

Although the Webdings® font is one of the Microsoft® core Web fonts preinstalled on virtually every computer in existence, using this font for icons in Web pages has never caught on. There is a simple reason for this: the font will not display in the Firefox® browser. The reason has to do with how the font is encoded, but the upshot is that you can’t use them.

Handwritten Fonts

Handwriting fonts are another design type that’s becoming increasingly popular. Despite how many feel about Comic Sans – the most notorious handwriting font of them all – type that looks as if it were written by hand gives a friendly, open, and approachable feel.

Letterpress and Other Text Shadow Based Effects

The letterpress effect is achieved by placing text on a contrasting, but not 100 percent contrast background color (i.e. not 100 percent black or 100 percent white), and then offsetting a text shadow with a color lighter than the background down and to the right and a darker drop shadow up and to the left. The offset should be only slight – one to three pixels depending on the text size – to avoid having the corners show a gap. Smaller type will not need any blur, but larger type may need a slight blur added to soften the effect slightly.

Slab Serifs Fonts

One important concern for Web typography is legibility, making sure that characters are as easy as possible to discern. There are a lot of factors that go into making a legible font, but two of the most important are consistent strokes and either thick serifs or no serifs at all. Thinner serifs tend to get fuzzy at the edges, as they are blurred for anti-aliasing. For this reason – as well as general style reasons – we are seeing a  lot of slab serif fonts being used in Web designs over the last year.

Typographic Voice Diversity

Type is to text what voice is to speech. The fonts you choose have a dramatic impact on the tone and emotion of the message you are presenting. As the famed book designer Richard Bringhurst put it, “When the type is poorly chosen, what the words say linguistically and what the letters imply visually are dishonest, disharmonious, out of tune.” Now that we are no longer limited to the “Fatal Five” families – the Arial®, Georgia®, Trebuchet® MS, Times®, and Verdana® faces – we are free to explore, mix and match a wider variety of typographic voices.

 Larger Font Sizes

Text on the Web has been too small for far too long. For a variety of reasons  including the “above the fold” myth and the belief that small type looks more sophisticated, most type on the Web is set on the screen at 12px or lower. However, as a clever yet simple experiment by Information Architects has shown, 12-point printed type is visually the same size as 16-pixel screen type.

Color Contrast

Designers intuitively know that perfect contrast can be visually dull. Black text on white background is much like making everything bold; everything is important so nothing stands out. You need contrast to engage the viewer’s eye and help them prioritize what they are looking at, and one way to do that is with different color contrasts.

Related posts:

1. Free Professional Fonts For Designers and Logo Artists
2. Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography
3. Most Useful Typography Tools for CSS
4. Top 10 Web Design Trends To Watch Out For In 2012
5. 15 Fresh High Quality Free Valentine’s Day Fonts

Filed in Cat: Graphics Tags: New Typography Desings for inspiration, Typography in Web Desogns, Usage of Typography