Typeplate: a typographic starter kit encouraging great type on the web | Hacker News Reader

Typeplate: a typographic starter kit encouraging great type on the web

typeplate.com

68 pointsTomte13 comments

3.5kb minified. Not too bad.

Although there are a few bits in there i'd strip right out, as they're rather unnecessary.

They claim they're not making any opinionated aesthetic design choices. Yet, the section about paragraph indenting is totally aesthetic, and personally their example is harder to read with margin-top disabled and indenting enabled.

Again with drop capitals. I never see websites using drop caps. They look ridiculous in the digital world and a waste of precious bytes.

Maybe it's just me being a moody developer, but i wish instead of cramming all these features into ambiguously named files like 'helpers', 'styles', 'functions', they'd just break each bit into its own named file.

- settings/colours

- generic/normalise

- objects/paragraph

- objects/list

- objects/figure

Etc. Etc.

At least then i get exclude the shit i don't want, or import the rules i do want into my own project without having to include the entire framework.

I can't help but think that web fonts are more page weight than they are worth. Is any significant number of your users going to be able to tell the difference between your 2MB webfont and Arial/Helvetica or Times?

I came to a similar conclusion and ripped out Butterick's gorgeous Equity Text from my web pages.

I still miss it somewhat, but then again, I'm hosting on NFSN and see the effect immediately.

Absolutely, web fonts are overrated. For most websites (i.e. websites where the majority of your readers have no idea what the difference between a font and a typeface is), your best bet in terms of speed and cross-platform aesthetics is to use a stack of system fonts.

See http://www.awayback.com/revised-font-stack/ for examples of well chosen cross platform font stacks that each achieve a certain style.

I like seeing the work those guys put in to that. My current (admittedly lazy) tendency is to use whatever default serif/sans-serif the user's browser has set. My reasoning is that if the user cares at all, they've set that font. Otherwise it doesn't matter. I might use one of those font stacks instead in the future.

On HN I've seen posts from people that have locally installed to their machine all or the majority of Google Fonts. It's kind of a "best of both worlds" approach in that you get a speedier web and all the nice typefaces and I've been debating doing it myself.

It almost seems like a useful browser service to possibly cache common font CDN fonts all the way into the system font store and maybe for the OSes to consider adding a lot more of the free as in speech/beer fonts into OS images.

Personally, I set Firefox to use the Croscore fonts and disallow use of any other fonts. It causes some weirdness with pages that use icon fonts (but for some reason, not all of them). Overall I like it.

This is great.

- Brings your content forward? Check.

- Clear documentation? Check.

- Explains design decisions? Check.

I think styling should be done with semantics as far as possible (avoiding classes).

One thing that you should look out for is that many users run on low brightness and has a lot of glare. So (while the lower contrast is better on high-end screens) you want as much contrast as possible!

Nice.

I had serious trouble with the demo, though. In order to figure out the switches at the top I had to dig in the code. Apparently when it displays off, it is actually on. A little color would help here.

Raising consciousness for typography is a good thing and urgently overdue.

Every frigging wiki software I know uses Arial, of all things, for body text. Can you believe that? A wiki as the kind of software where text plays the most central role of all, whose primary purpose is to have users read it over and over, and the programmer's best idea is to make the worst parody of a shit font nightmare ubiquitous.

Yeah, we're in dire need of more font awareness.

Am I the only one that was slightly taken aback by the casual use of the word "bitch" in a document that is mostly formal and well articulated?

I actually rather wish they HAD included more aesthetic design choices - as options, at least.

I'm not a typographer. I know I'm not a typographer. If there was a single kit I could just include in my sites to make it professional-grade readable, I'd just use it.

Sure, there might be 5% improvements to be made if I spent weeks researching. But I can use that time more effectively elsewhere.

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