Everything about Typography

Pick a connection profile and a target load time, and arithmetic hands you a byte budget per resource class. A web performance budget is a decision tool: it tells you which image, which font and which plugin gets told no, before the page ever gets slow.

Lorem ipsum has a longest word of thirteen letters and no umlauts at all, so a layout tested with it is tested with the easiest text it will ever hold. What placeholder text should actually prove, and a generator that produces it.

Two things go wrong with web fonts: the licence nobody opened, and the layout that jumps when the font finally arrives. Both answers are already inside the file, in tables you can read in your own browser before you serve a single byte.

A headline that sits beautifully over a dark corner becomes unreadable the moment somebody swaps the picture. That is a solved problem.

A character counter says two strings are the same length. A search result says one fits and the other does not. Search engines truncate by pixel width in a specific font, and the numbers are further apart than anyone expects.

The tag is rarely the problem. The picture is. Draw a 1200 by 630 card in the page, then work through the crops, the floors and ceilings the platforms enforce, and the design rules that survive being seen on a phone.

Bad type is rarely the wrong font. It is almost always spacing, size and a handful of habits nobody ever told you to drop.

Change the logo, the photo and the button color and a bad layout usually stays bad, because the fault was in the gaps rather than the parts.

Pasted text carries more than words: Word markup, PDF line breaks, tracking parameters, and a set of characters that render as nothing at all. What each one actually is, why WordPress makes some of it worse, and what to strip.

Somebody needs two hundred name badges by Thursday. The spreadsheet with all those names already exists, and typing them a second time is pure waste.