Until a couple of decades ago, typography was almost exclusively viewed in terms of printed work: books, magazines, posters, brochures. So-called new media have changed that — especially, of course, the internet. But both the design itself and the discussions or theory about it lacked the sophisticated tools and criteria that have been developed, over centuries, for print. This is now rapidly changing. Since less than two years, the general acceptance of web fonts specifications, embedded in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), has been allowing web designers to create typographic designs almost as sophisticated as those found in printed media. However, there are still a lot of misunderstandings and complications about typography for the web or for mobile devices. Good design for big and small screens takes a different set of skills and different sensibilities; and in spite of recent progress, not everything that’s possible in print can be done on the screen. Jan Middendorp (type critic, book and magazine designer) and Adam Twardoch (font technologist extraordinaire) jointly discuss the giant leap from typographic tradition to dynamic digital communication.
Keywords: web type, typography, typographic tradition, technological changes.
