Responsive Typography

I’m incredibly excited to see that Jason Pamental’s fantastic Responsive Typography is finally available. I had the great pleasure of reviewing an early galley and I can honestly say that it’s a book well worth reading. Jason’s natural and friendly style makes for an easy read and it’s chock-full of actionable recommendations and tips you’ll want to start using right away.

In fact, I think Responsive Typography is such an invaluable book, I offered to write the Foreword and Jason (and O’Reilly) have been kind enough to let me reprint it here:

Back in my day, all we had was the font element.

I fully realize that makes me sound like an old man, but I’m not ready to chase young whippersnappers off my lawn quite yet. But the fact remains that when I taught myself how to build web pages back in the mid-’90s, our design options were fairly limited. Heck, my first experience on the Web was on a text-based browser that provided me access to page upon glorious page of stark, blocky Courier. White text. Black background. 100% responsive.

When visual browsers finally hit the scene, ushering in images and the font element, we web designers finally had the opportunity to move out of monospace. I’ll leave it to Jason to delve into the history of typography on the Web, but the advent of visual browsers opened the floodgates for use (and abuse) of type online. It was the desktop publishing revolution all over again: a direct assault on the sensibilities of anyone with even the slightest understanding of typography.

Over the years, we’ve made a lot of mistakes with web type: Fonts embedded in images. Fonts embedded in Flash. Fonts embedded in JavaScript. Many of those were attempts to bypass the gridlock created by browser makers, type foundries, and the W3C, who couldn’t come to a consensus on how to balance a desire for more type options on the Web while ensuring typographers got paid for all of their hard work. While they bickered, we soldiered on, looking for more accessible and maintainable ways to use more typefaces.

And while we were busy tinkering with sIFR and Cufón, eagerly awaiting the day we could abandon those hacks and have real browser support for actual font formats, an army of little black rectangles had caught a whiff of the awesome content we were serving up to desktop browsers.

Like ants at a Sunday picnic, these little black rectangles initially appeared one or two at a time. They were easily ignored, a nuisance. Nothing to take too seriously. But before we knew what was happening, that trickle turned into a flood and those little rectangles were hungry. Instead of taking a crumb here and there—which we tossed to them with a great sense of self-satisfaction—these ambitious ants were carrying off whole deli trays and the friggin’ New York Times.

These little black rectangles are, of course, the surge of handheld (or at least hand-holdable) devices that have been redefining our concept of “the Web” almost daily. They exhibit widely variable screen sizes: from about the size of a matchbook, to ones that are bigger than an extra large pizza. They sport a plethora of pixel densities, new interaction methods, unpredictable network connection speeds, and low-powered processors that can’t possibly compete with traditional laptop and desktop CPUs (not to mention a handful of different operating systems and browsers). All of these factors affect how—and even whether—your typographic choices will make it to your customers, and it’s a lot to take in.

Thankfully, Jason has your back. The book you’re now reading is invaluable: it’s chock-full of useful approaches, practical code samples, and advice for dealing with typography in the age of responsive web design.

By the time you finish this brief book, you’ll be ready to handle pretty much any device someone may throw at you. But hopefully they won’t. Devices are hard. And expensive.

— Aaron Gustafson
   Author, Adaptive Web Design

By the way, if you’re on a typography kick, I’ll also recommend an excellent new book by another Jason I respect greatly: Jason Santa Maria’s On Web Typography. The two books books compliment each other perfectly, with very little overlap. They’d make an awesome bundle.