Good typography is just as important on a Web page as it is in any other medium. The fact that it appears on a computer screen and not on a piece of paper is immaterial; it should still be pleasing to look at and easy to read.

In every situation where type is used i.e.: in publishing, signage, packaging, television, etc., designers have to adapt their techniques to suit the medium.

A headline style that works just fine in a magazine spread would not necessarily work on a poster. A magazine is always viewed straight-on at arm’s length, so letter spacing can be as tight as you like and the words will still be readable. A poster is, more often than not, viewed obliquely, which distorts the type to some extent. Here, a little extra letter spacing helps identification of the individual characters, and hence the words.

Designing for a computer screen has its own set of problems. Add to these the elastic nature of a Web page, which has to work across different computer platforms and screen sizes, and the problems get even worse. It is the designer’s job to understand these issues and to address them — to maintain some kind of control when everything else is shifting.

If you are familiar with style sheets in your page layout or in word processing programs, you will understand how it is possible to create a set of type specifications and apply them to a block of text or a whole site. You can make all headlines 48-point Times bold, subheadings 32-point Helvetica bold, and the body text 10-point Times New Roman with whatever leading and indents you like. If you want to change the overall look of your layout to something more technical, you only need edit the style sheet. You could change the headings to Arial Black, the subheads to Arial Bold, and the body text to Arial quickly and easily.

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