Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference that took place in Nashville early last month.
For today?’s podcast, I have the pleasure to be interviewing, over the phone, Jason Cranford Teague, Director Web Design Standards, AOL Global Programming. Jason is a member of the W3C?’s CSS working group and is the author of the forthcoming book “Speaking in Styles”: Fundamentals of CSS for Web designers.
I asked Jason to summarize his session on the topic of Typography on the Web and to share his latest efforts with the CSS working group at the w3c. Check out the five minute interview with Jason Cranford Teague on the WOW Technology Minute website.
Jason?’s Typography links and resources.
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Transcript of Typography on the Web – Interview Jason Cranford Teague
BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference that took place in Nashville last month. For today?’s podcast I had the pleasure to be interviewing, over the phone, Jason Cranford Teague, Director of Web Design Standards AOL Global Programming. Jason is a member of the W3C?’s css working group and is the author of a forthcoming book SPEAKING IN STYLES: FUNDAMENTALS FOR CSS WEB DESIGNERS. Jason, good afternoon and thanks for agreeing to this interview.
JASON CRANFORD TEAGUE: Hey Bill. Thanks for having me on.
BILL: Can you summarize your session on the topic of typography on the Web and can you also share with the listeners and the subscribers of this podcast your latest work at the W3C?
JASON: Yeah, I?’ve been working on Web typography for a long time now. It?’s a growing concern of mine, something that back in the late 90s we thought we were pretty much set in the way we were going to go and that we would have downloadable Web fonts just like we have downloadable images, anytime now. Well it?’s ten years on now almost and we?’re not seeing a lot of advancement in typography on the Web. We?’re pretty much stuck at Arial, Times and Georgia as being the primary fonts. Then you?’ll see Verdana and a couple of other fonts used every now and again. But there are really a lot more fonts out there that we have as Web designers at our disposal. Those ones, the Arial and Times and Georgia, Verdana and Trebuchet MS, those are the core Web fonts. Those are the fonts that are installed on virtually all computers because a while back Microsoft decided to start an initiative to get these core Web fonts on all machines. For various reasons that initiative is no longer with us, although the fonts still are.
What we?’ve got to look at is what fonts are likely to be pre-installed on the end-user?’s machine. There?’s a surprisingly large list of fonts that we can know with a certain certainty will be pre-installed on their machine. Mostly these fonts come from the fonts that will be pre-installed by the operating system. But we can also look at fonts that are likely to be installed by iLife on the Mac, which comes now as a standard on all Macs, and Microsoft Office, which is installed on a lot of machines. I don?’t have the exact numbers but typographically we know that it?’s a lot of machines. And so why not make use of those fonts that are likely to be pre-installed in our Web designs? Since we have cascading style sheets, if they don?’t have the font in question then we can always have a fallback font.
But this also means that as designers we have to think about typography a little bit more fluidly than we have in the past. That we may not get the exact font we want, the exact font we were designing around. But that if we look at trying to get fonts with similar leading and similar width, then we should be okay from a design standpoint. And so that?’s what I talked about.
BILL: And I take it that your book, your forthcoming book covers a fair amount of that?
JASON: Yeah, the book will look at ways that you can use this fluid typography in your designs, to create designs that will stand out typographically from other designs.
BILL: Sure, sure. That?’d be great. Terrific and I?’m real pleased to hear. And you have a PDF of the information that you provided at the conference, would you be willing to share that with the listeners of this podcast?
JASON: I am willing to share that with anybody and everybody. That?’s my job, to get the word out. Okay, the url is www.speaking-in-styles.com/web-typography.
BILL: Excellent. I understand you?’ve been doing a fair amount of work at the W3C? Can you give us an update on that?
JASON: Yeah, well that?’s the other side of the coin. Not only do we need to figure out what we can do practically, but we also have to be looking at the future. And that?’s what I?’ve been trying to do with the W3C. I?’m working with a great guy there, John Daggett, he is actually the lead developer on typography for the Mozilla Foundation. And he and I are working together to craft a better font specification for the future, one that looks at what?’s technically feasible but then also what designers need. So we?’re looking at not only sprucing up some of the styles, like adding the ability to put a font outline, that is to outline your fonts, put a stroke around your fonts, but we?’re also looking at ways to improve the ability to control leading and kerning and open-type font and true-type font capabilities that are available but not things that you can really access through cascading style sheets, currently.
BILL: Excellent.
JASON: So we want to be able to make the Web a much more friendly place, a much friendlier place for designers and for typographers in general.
BILL: Great cause. And we certainly appreciate that support and for all of the things that you do for the Web Jason, including your sessions, your books, and your resources.
JASON: Yeah, thanks so much. One resource I do want to mention, it?’s a link off of that url I gave you, but it?’s also a list of what I?’m calling “Web-Safe Fonts” and those are the fonts that I mentioned before are likely to be pre-installed. And if you take a look at the list, it gives you the font name that you can use in your css, it shows you all the different weights and styles that that font comes in, and then it gives you a ranking of each font of how likely it is to be pre-installed, that you?’re operating. I?’m presenting that as hopefully a resource for all Web designers so that they can quickly pick out different fonts other than Helvetica, Arial, Times and Georgia to use in their design.
BILL: Well that?’s a great resource Jason, thanks for sharing that and for all that you do for the Web profession. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), The WOW Technology Minute, on the phone with Jason Cranford Teague, Director of Web Design Standards AOL Global Programming and one of the Web professionals of the highest caliber. Thanks for your time today Jason.
JASON: No problem Bill, thanks for having me on.