Customer Reviews

Great Web Typography

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I bought this book, I was hoping for a great reference book to teach me a bit about picking good web fonts. I thought maybe it could give me some ideas for the sites that I'm working on. This book has done much more than that. Many times when I'm working on a site, something just doesn't "feel" right. The only way that I've been able to fix that has been by redoing the entire site until it does "feel" right. I didn't understand what was going on. Peck has taught me, by using countless real-life examples and full-color screenshots from other professional sites, what was wrong. My wife tells me every day how much better my pages have started to look. Her words: "Your stuff looked good before, but now it looks professional." Buy this book; read this book; do what this book says.

Defintely one of the best web design books I've read in a while. My strengths lie in the coding side of web design, so I purchased this book to learn more about typography- as you would expect from the title. I am happy to say that I learned much, much more. You'll find lots of great typography, graphics, and page layout tips. Also, the author conducts some excellent interviews with other professional designers which lead to even more useful tips. Bottom line- a great value, and a must-buy for the beginning to intermidiate web developer.

I'd been looking for a nice book of web design case studies, and about 1/4 of this book is case studies and interviews. And much of the rest is live mockups to clearly illustrate an important point such as how browsers interpret weight. I enjoyed the interviews and the more design-oriented discussions. And I really enjoyed the author taking us through the design of her own site right down to the grid on paper and basic layout as a case study (though I greatly preferred her work for others displayed in the book). Ironically, the book itself is pretty poorly designed, especially the cover, which violates almost all of the author's advice!

The author's basic advice on fonts is sound. I found it useful to read other books on typography first -- this one won't give you the "classical" education about print fonts. On the other hand, almost everything you know about print fonts can be tossed out the window. The exceptions are letter and line spacing, color and contrast and size. I thought the author did an excellent job of presenting those. There's also a great deal of emphasis on web-specific typography that I just haven't seen elsewhere.

There was a nice discussion of graphic versus HTML fonts, with the author urging the reader to use graphic text for headlines (because of kerning, anti-aliasing and font choice) and for small buttons (because of font choice). In particular, I was fascinated by the in-depth study of Joe Gillespie's crisp, readable pixel-specific fonts such as MINI7 (7 pixels high, all caps, and a perennial favorite on the web for tiny text). Many sites follow these guidelines, but I prefer to use straight HTML. It resizes better.

Another polarizing issue is pure CSS versus table-based layouts. The author uses a mix, as do most design-centric designers. Given portability issues, etc., I remain agnostic on this issue.

There was a lot of discussion of software of the how-to-navigate-Photoshop-version-N's-menus variety. That's already out of date. Most of the case studies are no longer live, or have changed their format considerably. Ditto for a lot of the recommendations on browsers, CSS versions, HTML, etc.

There's also a section on fonts for Flash at the end. Because I don't intend to use Flash, I didn't read it.

I liked this book, but would have liked many more case studies, and much less walking me through menus and CSS.

The problem with Great Web Typography is that it claims to be for all users, beginner to advanced. I consider myself an intermediate to advanced CSS user with an intermediate knowledge of typography, and I was bored. The book moves very slowly through the benefits of CSS and the basics of CSS, both of which can be learned through ten minutes of reading on the internet, for free.

I can find a basics book fun to read, but I found the style of Great Web Typography frustrating. Generally, I have no problem with differences in writing style, as long as the style is not distracting. But, the writing here contains an annoying weight to it, sometimes making me wonder why Peck included a particular sentence. For example, at the end of a cautionary blurb about graphic text, Peck drops this useless nugget of wisdom, "Learning to create text with no bounds does not give you license to avoid common sense." (139) I'm not sure what that means, as Peck doesn't elaborate, and it made me think she only included it because it sounds catchy.

This bloated style makes reading the book a chore, but even worse than the style are the misspellings, like something is "in an accessable area" (37) or something "is used in a supporting roll" (120). These gaffes become outright funny when Peck advises you to watch your spelling. Even Microsoft Word can catch that first one.

Probably the most frustrating part of this book is how far the visual examples are from the text. When the text mentions a visual example, you have to leave the text, find the example (which is sometimes on the bottom of the page, sometimes on the side of the page, and occasionally, on a different page), view the example, and then find where you left off in the text. This random layout shows a surprising ignorance of how people read a book.

All these things built up, and after getting through half of this book, I returned it.

I bought this book to learn more about the graphical/visual side of web page layout.

Such as:
- "Which font types and sizes are best?"
- "How do I best divide up whitespace?"
- "How should my headline fonts differ in size and shape from my content text?"
- "What color combinations should I use?"

This book answered those questions and many, many more!

Wendy Peck presents sound methods of typography, page balance, proper use of colors, proper use of graphical text and overall layout in an easy-to-understand way. I was seeing great results on my current project after reading just the first section of this book.

Her design ideas can really help your web sites cross the line from "good" to "professional".

Another surprise in the book is her advocacy of using CSS for content styling. Her in-depth section on CSS styling of links and menus is awesome.

As a "one-person-web-design-freelancer", that needs to know how to do it all, this book is a great addition to my library. I highly recommend it.

I received the book promptly. It was in perfect condition and I'm very glad that I bought it because it gives great tips on how to improve the looks of your web fonts. Great book.

I'm was pleasantly surprised when I picked this up at the library. I was looking through book and book of dry critiques of like, the 15 typefaces in the Franklin Gothic family, and what century Bembo was introduced. Or there were the ones that used La Bamba and every other overused trendy font that deserve a place on a TGIFriday's menu or a skate-punker's home page on MySpace, and provided flash with no theory whatsoever

But the best surprise is that this book covers things like color theory, contrast, readability (ask any marketing department about that one!) and issues that are critical in good design. So few books, even ones that claim to teach page design, give the universal, real world applicable tips that are found in this little gem. A reviewer below stated that this is a book for beginners. Well, yes, but there are plenty of "advanced" designers who don't know the first thing about practical form AND function design. Just look at every other site online and you'll see that just because you can use Quark, the basics of Photoshop and a web design program doesn't mean you know how to design. It's like one of my favorite lines; "You can teach a monkey to read. You just can't teach him to understand."

I love this book so much I'm actually going to buy it. And that says a lot, being a starving artist and all.

I found this book to be an extremely worthwhile purchase, even though I didn't find the last third of it very useful.

As someone who was previously familiar with HTML and has worked as a computer programmer for several years, this book very much helped me move beyond the coding aspect of HTML and think more about how to design better looking pages.

Typography is part of the book, but it also covers many other topics like layout, design, how to do rollover menus, and cascading style sheets.

The book does have some inaccurate information. For example, the author said that Comic Sans MS wasn't a safe font to use because it might not be on your user's computer, but according to Microsoft it's on everyone's computer (even Macs) unless they are still using IE 3.0 and Windows 95.

This book is highly recommended if you have experience coding web pages, but your web pages are real ugly and don't have that professional look. This book will help you achieve the professional look.