Monthly Archives: July 2007

Design Elements: Sans-Serif Fonts

All fonts used to have serifs. The first sans-serif font appeared in 1816, but as a novelty, and until halfway through the twentieth century people only used sans-serif fonts for titles and decorative effects. They are now widely used for … Continue reading

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Design Elements: Serif Fonts

Serif fonts have small strokes at the end of the main strokes of each character. (Sans-serif fonts don’t.) You can see them fairly easily even in my small illustration, in the word “Serifs”. You can’t see them in the words … Continue reading

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Design Elements: Font Families

Actually, there are supposed to be five basic font families. As well as the four I listed in my last post, there is a family called “fantasy.” What qualifies a font to be included in this family? The answer is: … Continue reading

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Design Elements: Fonts

In the print world a typeface is a set of printable characters that go together, such as Times Roman (designed by Stanley Morison in 1931) or Helvetica (designed by Max Miedinger in 1957). A font is a particular size of … Continue reading

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Design Elements

In my last post, I referred airily to ‘design elements.’ It occurs to me that not everyone appreciates that Web design is more than a matter of layout and colour schemes. Every single element of a Web page needs to … Continue reading

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How to detect last-century design

For browsing the Internet, do you use Firefox? (If not, why not?) If you do, here is a simple way of checking for last-century design practices. Pick a page from the site you want to check. Click on the View … Continue reading

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The 24-hour promise

I keep coming across these companies that promise you a top position on Google within 24 hours. Naturally, they don’t spell out how they are going to do this. They are simply feeding off the myth that there is some … Continue reading

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Empty houses

When I first came to Spain, in the summer of 1967, I used to play football with some Spanish lads on the deserted beaches of Gandia and Dénia. Over the years, I saw things change (you wouldn’t find either beach … Continue reading

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Domain name hyphenation (2)

On the 19th of June this year, I posted a short piece about whether or not you should use domain names with hyphens in them. My main aim was to suggest that this was an open issue—to counter “authoritative” statements … Continue reading

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Beyond Compare

My last post was about moving sites from one Web hosting provider to another. There’s something I didn’t mention which is very important. When you copy all the files from the old site, you need to preserve the directory structure, … Continue reading

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