[Air-l] Web font sizes

[Andrew Wenn]

Hmm,

I reckon it may be many things.

Hobbyists I agree with especially for small business. Our research has 
shown that in Australia many of these get their nephew, neice or Joe 
Bloggs down the road to do it, because they 'muck around with 
computers'.

Some of our IS graduating students go to web design positions and I 
know they have no idea of designing for print or design at all. What 
they learn  we teach them in 12 weeks. I suspect many other 
institutions are the same way. I dare anyone to teach good design, 
JavaScript, meta-tagging, good HTML coding and the myriad of 
accessibility issues in that time.

Many web design places have monitors far larger than what is available 
to the general public. And you can bet that most places don't do proper 
checks of their work on different size monitors and resolutions.

There will be some remnants of print culture. But, I suspect not as 
much as you might think.

Our faculty has just paid an enormous amount off money to have its 
website redesigned - guess what font size they used 8pt. The top level 
management thought it looked good because they could get more 
information on a page.

Andrew.





On 31/01/2005, at 1:31 AM, jeremy hunsinger wrote:

> a more likely explanation to me for most of the web isn't that the web 
> designer is 'print' oriented, but that they are hobbyists and really 
> don't understand the full implications of design decisions or they are 
> css or html geeks who like to play with the wizbang aspects of 
> css/html, on the basis that it will work say 70% of the time.   
> however, perhaps in the field of professional web designers there is 
> still a print culture.  I seem to recall that actually there was a 
> study on this in the late 90's, though that was a different world.
> On Jan 30, 2005, at 9:22 AM, elijah wright wrote:
>
>>
>>> The reason so many sites use small fonts is mainly because it's 
>>> fashionable, and looks prettier than larger fonts. Designers do, in 
>>> fact, need to become more aware of how their design works with 
>>> various sizes of fonts, and find attractive ways of presenting 
>>> information
>>
>> the thing is, most 'web designers' are ignorant of the fact that 
>> design for the web and graphic design for print are very different 
>> tasks.
>>
>> i tend to browse the web at 120% or so, in firefox.  if i see a site 
>> where text flows over the top of images, or the layout has serious 
>> breakage at 'only' 120%, then my assumption is that the designer is 
>> trying to work with the web as if it is a print medium - one where 
>> they have control down to a single em, or where they can precisely 
>> specify colors (a la Pantone) rather than selecting combinations of 
>> the 'web safe colors'.
>>
>> I should mention, in relation to Denise's mention of IE's font size 
>> selection options, that I consider that functionality within IE to be 
>> terribly broken and limited.  Other folks are definitely doing it 
>> better, making browsers that are more accessible.
>>
>> --elijah
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> jeremy hunsinger
> jhuns at vt.edu
> www.cddc.vt.edu
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