If you can’t find the resource you need — it usually means you should make it yourself.

I often look for specific articles on typography that nobody seems to have written yet. Some topics are talked about extensively. Other areas are even more amazingly thoroughly covered (there are no geeks like typography geeks). But I’m often searching in vain for guides that:

• focus on user interfaces in web apps (not editorial web sites)
• go beyond the basics of web typography (without getting too advanced)
• hand out practical advice on considerations when working with text

The typical situation when I try to find articles like these, are in discussions about how to typeset a specific part of user interface. My gut feeling tells me what to do, but I lack the words to explain why to people I work with. The process of exploring this topic in writing, will itself go a long way in giving me proper reasoning behind any opinions. I’m not quite sure about the format yet, but I know I want to explore this topic more — and see where it takes me as I write about it.

Type related topics that I very much enjoy reading about,
but don’t plan to write about now

• comprehensive introductions to typography
• essays on legibility and readability
• how to select typefaces
• FOUT and web font implementation
• proper quotation marks, numeral sets and other character geekery
• anti-aliasing, font hinting, rendering across devices
• deep dives into responsive font size and sizing units
• composition for editorial web sites
• layout, baseline grid, type scale

Topics I want to explore further

• alignment — when to go left, and when to consider center or right
• semantics — for tables, lists and other bits of text
• columns — when to style text in columns and when to find other alternatives
• practical examples on using size, colour, bold, italic, uppercase and space
• cascading simple solutions for line height, line length and long words
• working with text and icons together
• punctuation — for data, content heavy pages, interaction