Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

“Control” on the Web

May 18, 2007

Design (Web) · My work · Typography

Lately, one of my inter­ests has been to improve my skills in the area of typog­ra­phy (started after hear­ing Cameron Moll’s Essen­tial Web Skills). I have read a cou­ple of books on the sub­ject and come across some great resources on the Web.

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I heard Richard Rut­ter of Clear­left speak to the sub­ject of Web typog­ra­phy on the Boag­world pod­cast. Richard has put together some thoughts on webtypography.net. I was pok­ing around today on that site and came across these thoughts related to using ems instead of pix­els in defin­ing the size of type on a Web page.

“… the beauty and advan­tage of the Web as medium is that read­ers are able to adjust their read­ing envi­ron­ment to suit their own needs. This is a con­cept that should be acknowl­edged & embraced, and built into web­site designs from the ground up.”

I have to admit, I have been reluc­tant to embrace using ems instead of pix­els. Part of it is that I have not really under­stood ems. I have been hes­i­tant because I have to relin­quish con­trol as a designer. But I think what Richard says here makes good sense. The Web is a medium where read­ers can adjust their read­ing envi­ron­ment. This should be rec­og­nized and embraced. It is part of the medium.

I had already been think­ing about this after pick­ing up Steve Krug’s sec­ond edi­tion of Don’t Make Me Think. I was read­ing about acces­si­bil­ity and he also addressed the issue of resiz­able type. He talked about the fact that design­ers fear a com­pro­mised design when they hear “acces­si­bil­ity.” I think that has been my fear in using ems and giv­ing up con­trol. It becomes more of an issue when using text in “nav­i­ga­tion bars” when increas­ing text size can break the design. I am moti­vated to read Dan Cederholm’s chap­ter about this in Bul­let­proof Web Design.