Typography
Typefaces and typesetting are cool. I came under the spell of Donald Knuth’s TeX and LaTeX many years ago, and haven’t looked back. I find it difficult to read a document manuscript when someone sends it to me in Microsoft Word, double-spaced with not nearly enough text on the page. There’s something about a properly typeset document, with well-chosen typefaces and decent kerning and hyphenation, that makes me want to sit down and read.
The web used to be awful for typesetting and typography. But CSS has made it possible to do good design (witness the Basic Math template used here for WordPress), and even more recently Typekit has made it simple to add rich typography to your site, largely without knowing all the details of CSS and web design.
Except, at the moment…the typefaces I actually like in Typekit render terribly on Windows, especially on Internet Explorer. It’s not Typekit’s fault, it’s just that the faces I like render well on a Mac and terribly on Windows. I won’t get into how and why Windows is doing the wrong thing or whether it’s the type designer, but suffice it to say that I’ve returned to standard web fonts and tweaking CSS manually, while muttering obscenities in the privacy of my office in the general direction of Redmond…
Perhaps we’ll go back to having good typography on MadsenLab fairly soon. I hope so.
