Design: Typography

Earlier instantiations of the DAC website, especially in exhibition pages, relied heavily on <font> tags, non-breaking spaces, and <br> tags to achieve closely and variously related positioning of text and images. This page-to-page variety and tightly integrated layout control in browsers prevalent at the time the pages were built, however, came at a price. Some pages' layouts broke badly when displayed in newer browsers.

This environmental sensitivity has led to the reworking of many earlier pages in more browser-neutral ways. Most of what used to be accomplished with <font> tags is now implemented with CSS (except in specific locations, such as search forms, where Netscape 4's buggy CSS rendering has made reversion to <font> tags and non-breaking spaces necessary). Due to platform- and browser-dependent differences in type rendering and CSS support, some type layout still suffers in certain browsers (for example, in regard to paragraph leading and other spacing issues). Future moves towards consistent CSS rendering and other standards-based practices by browser developers should allow us to mitigate these issues in coming years.

During its first five years, the site used serif font families for most of its text (chiefly Palatino for browsers with access to that font, with Times Roman variants as secondary options). In its current form the site calls for sans-serif fonts (Verdana, Espy Sans, Arial, and so on) in most cases. Although serif fonts do enhance readability in some cases (even on screen) and are a good match for many of the graphic materials reproduced on the site, we're currently experimenting to evaluate this benefit against the generally cleaner appearance of sans-serif families in many onscreen environments.

Back to Design: Color | Forward to JavaScript Functionality