Typographical Design Reference

Table of Contents

🅐 Introduction

This article is designed to be a living typographical reference, aiming to not only display the selected and curated styles of my website, but explain the decisions behind them in detail. It's meant to be as informative as it is demonstrative, and provide greater value than a sample catalogue of various type or an example article with irrelevant or disruptive content.

🅑 Drop caps

Adrop cap is more than a set piece: it's a statement. It's a flourish. It's a typographer's mark—an indication of style. The font chosen for drop caps on my website is Zallman Caps. I chose it for the lightly decorative nature set behind otherwise untouched letterforms. The lack of a heavy decorative skew ensures easy legibility without compromising a tasteful flare. In addition, the square boundaries allow for a clean edge when set within the rest of a paragraph. This is important for managing whitespace around the affected lines, and avoiding their visual disruption. Other, more decorative typefaces make effective management of whitespace either ineffective or outright impossible due to the inability to affect the margins of specific lines in CSS.

🅒 For body copy, I chose to use Minion Pro. This typeface was designed by Robert Slimbach and first released in 1990. It was inspired by classical, old style typefaces of the late Renaissance, a period of elegant, beautiful, and highly readable type designs. Minion Pro aimed to combine the aesthetic and functional qualities that make text type highly readable with the versatility of OpenType digital technology, yielding remarkable flexibility and typographic control, both for body copy or display. It features a variety of optical sizes, weights, and widths to accomadate different uses, although for the benefit of readers with limited internet connections, additional variants must be enabled in. order to benefit from any greater level of design.