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What fonts should we use on our webs? What color schemes should we use?
The important visual attributes:
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shape position |
Behavior is very important, too. To help the reader orient and navigate, here's a quick list of the parts or devices you need to consider: text, sound, graphics, images.
You can always use words for navigation: top, back, up. You can put text on a graphic . You can explain navigational technique on a help screen. As long as you're clear, consistent, and unobtrusive, it doesn't matter. However, you can't have text without a typeface. So you have to know fonts. You can't have text without color, either. And, of course, some of the text is going to be links to other web pages.
Fonts, fonts, and more fonts. You can't learn enough about them because typeface is a fateful and unavoidable choice.
Daniel Will-Harris's Typofile
The best general typeface resource I've found
Why
Type on the Web Is So Bad
by Eric Eaton
Webmonkey, December 4, 1997
Appropriate use of fonts are needed to serve, not overpower the text. They allow for easier reading and can convey a meaning.
Color is used to save the viewer from thinking too much. It breaks the page into useful chunks so that association and browsing in the site can be effortless.
The wise use of color and fonts creates cohesiveness and site identity when moving within the site, allows for sufficient legibility so they enhance not distract the viewer, perform as an unconscious persuader, attract attention to specific areas, set the style and tone of a site, and give personality and image. If you continually use a particular font and or color scheme the viewers will soon associate your company with them.
Poor use of color and fonts can cause visitors to leave your
site. First impression counts, especially on the Net and the viewer needs to
feel comfortable to stay at the site. Unreadable fonts, oversaturation of color,
and inconsistent use of fonts and color which confuse the system will lead the
viewers off your site
.
FlamingText.com - sample -->
This site allows you to create all kinds of quality graphics for web pages and other uses. It's free, fast and easy to use. In just seconds you can create headings, buttons, arrows and much more, just like the pros!
E-Sources
Font Empire -- Where Fonts Rule
Many sites use fonts and color successfully and you needn't reinvent the wheel. Using the same fonts or color schemes for your site will allow for a more pleasing presentation.
Broward-Realtor.com - "A House Sold Name"
www.petals.com.au or at Web Design Clinic's article about it
Marine Midland Bank (corporate)
NBC (corporate, clean)
Nickelodeon (fun, youthful)
Buffalo Sabres (high contrast, identity)
Hershey's (identity)
Discovery Channel (chunks)
Eyeball Design (color scheme)
What color schemes should we use?
Lynda Weinman's color schemes
J.L. Morton's Color Matters
Separation
Anxiety: The Myth of the Separation of Style and Content
by Bob Stein
A List Apart, 2000
Now, there is much art in attracting attention and I don't mean to belittle that power, but there is also art to communicating well in visual media. In Tufte's Envisioning Information, quite the opposite of separation occurs. Presentation makes sweet love to structure when conceiving an informative vision: "To envision information—and what bright and splendid visions can result—is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art." This is design inextricable from authorship. It's style that cannot be dissected from content without bleeding away informative power.
How can I see what different background colors look like with different text color combinations?
This color palette-generation program is geared toward web designers. You're allowed to select 5 colors from the 216-color web-safe palette and see how they interact. Colors are like words; just as context can alter the meaning of a word or phrase, surrounding colors can make a central color look different to the human eye. Experiment and see what effects the colors have on one another.
VisiBone's Color Lab - click on colors on top left chart
Digital Studio's Color Schemer - online version | color tutorial
Software that creates matching color schemes for web designers.
Rather than try to duplicate the classics, this salon will focus on webs, web making, and web using:
typefaces
data visualization
color
Colorit isn't reliable
In April 1999, I bought a dead-tree book, my first in a long
while: Coloring
Web Graphics.2 by Lynda
Weinman. It has hundreds of 
swatches like this
one, which help a graphically challenged person like me. Q:
Why did I buy it? A: Every time I
look at the book, the colors are the same. It will be many years before the
atoms in the ink and paper change enough to change the colors. Then, of course,
the inks will fade, the glue will dry, and the acidic paper will burn itself.
Libraries are losing millions of books a year to this silent fire.
Now go to a TV store or a computer store, the kind where the rows stacked on rows all display the same program. The colors vary from model to model. Unlike the atoms that make up the printed page of a book, the digital information will never change. But monitors (cathode ray tube - CRT) are the oldest technology we use and it shows.
Problem: new media requires new thinking
I'm accustomed to words and images that stay still on a piece of paper. Choosing a look and feel for a fluid, dynamic web seems a lot harder.
Short-term solution: don't worry
Make the colors consistent and provide a lot of contrast. New thinking: Ricci Street is not a web as I see it, but the many webs that y'all see.
Long-term solution: calibrated monitors
Of the two current proposals, sRGB is a color space standard and ICC embeds a profile into every image file. Learn more about color management.
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