Jason Lyman's Nuthouse

Classifications of Type

No matter what field of design one works in, whether it be online, print, motion, etc., It’s important for the designer to have a good understanding of typography. An understanding of the terminology and classifications really helps when a client wants a specific look or feel to their website. Knowing which fonts were around and when can help convey a sense of time or timelessness to your design.

Julius Leroy Frazier, author of Modern Type Display, said: “Faces of type are like men’s faces. They have their own expression; their complexion and peculiar twists and turns of line identify them immediately to friends, to whom each is full of identity”

Let’s start by looking at the different classifications of typography.

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I like Weather.com. I have widgets that pull information from the website, I check it nearly everyday to corroborate what my local weatherman is saying. I like the hourly forecasts. Planning your day can be made much easier with that, especially when your main mode of transportation is a motorcycle. Getting caught in a rainstorm unprepared is not such a fun thing.

But there were things about the site that I didn’t like. Mainly, I didn’t like how the dropdown menus actually dropped up. (How you can drop up I don’t really know.) It always got in the way of the search field because I would usually be moving my mouse from below to go to the search feature. There were other smaller things, like the dated look of the site itself, and while many of the features themselves were useful and worked very slick the overall look was very blasé.

The new weather.com

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