Ampersand web typography conference

Last Friday 17th June I went to the brilliant one-day web-typography conference Ampersand, in Brighton.

The conference focused on all things type for web designers and type enthusiasts keen to get the industry low-down on the future of web typography. The speaker’s varied from type engineers, type designers, developers, and self-confessed type geeks. The general buzz was that the future is very bright for web typography with CSS 3 leading the way for exemplary creative web typography and font embedding. The site voltagefashionamplified.com beautifully demonstrates the excellent design and typographic flexibility of CCS3 with live text (remember to scroll horizontally – not the best interactive design!).

Mark Boulton spoke about the challenge of designing for so many screen sizes. He suggested that we should be designing outside of Photoshop and within the browser. He was leaning towards liquid layouts and responsive web design. Mark Boulton suggested that we should be designing pockets of content rather than the whole canvas; so that with a liquid layout our designed elements are preserved and repositioned to the desired screen size. The current trend for responsive layout tends to be around repositioning the core layout at 4 specific screen sizes. This is where we need to be designing in the browser otherwise we will be designing 4 potential layouts for each page! See some examples of liquid layouts / responsive web design here

Jason Santa Maria was another standout speaker for me. His talk was very inspirational and he knows his type, I recognized a few of the 8 simple ways to improve your typography in his presentation, such as hanging quotes, correct emphasis, and clean rags. His words and
polished presentation were very inspirational, with such words as –

"You’re the luckiest people in the world…
you get to spend a whole day talking about type!"

"This is a fantastic time to be a designer,
because someone has opened the door again."

Jason Santa Maria described how much of the identity of a brand is tied up in their logo and typography. Making an example of The Guardian by covering up the logo and asking “Who’s site is this and why?" To which an audience member replied – “The Guardian, because of the grid”. The point here is that if The Guardian utilized their typographical design throughout their site then we would immediately recognise the brand. Jason Santa Maria then used the New Yorker as an example of how to do it. A lot of the brand identity and style of the New Yorker is tied up in its typography; embedding the New Yorker font and using this distinctive typography design takes the brand to another level newyorker.com