Typography and Other Design Delights

In a do-or-die attempt to master positioning on web pages with cascading style sheets, and taking advantage of a relatively slow time at work, I’ve been availing myself of the courses available at Lynda.com, which were paid for by my employers earlier this year but which I’ve not had a chance to get to. There is a bewildering number of online courses on offer, and while I’ve been working steadily through CSS2 Essential Training, I couldn’t help but have a gander at InDesign CS2 Professional Typography, or Typographic Principles (or Audio or Podcasting or Alpha Channels or dot dot dot).

This all comes at a good time, because I found out today that Robert Brinkhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, an essential book that came out after I’d trained as a graphic designer, is being applied to web design by Richard Rutter. Hints on how to control spaces between words and kerning using style sheets are going to be a huge help to me.

(Language Hat referred me to Rex Sorgatz’s Fimoculous and his Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading, which provided the above link through Drawn; it’s a fantastic list. A couple of particularly quirky finds: Strange Maps, whose maps are fascinating but whose typography in the text is a bit lamentable (hope they look up the Rutter, above), and Quotation Marks, to which all comers are invited to submit photos of inappropriate use of quotation marks.