In 2012, during a period when web typography was rapidly evolving, Elliot wrote a series of blog posts on “Tomorrow’s Web Type Today.” He covered the topics of ligatures, subsets, swashes, and stylesheets in his posts and outlined best practices for incorporating them all into web design projects.
Little did he know, those same principles would continue to form the backbone of typography on the web for the next two years (and they’re still going strong). Revising his list for 2014, Elliot has continued with a new series of posts on “Advanced Web Typography.” He noted updates on topics from the previous series (the short version: not a lot has changed) and added posts on kerning, justification and hyphenation, and responsive typography.In his talk, Elliot discussed how to bring these concepts to life using font-feature-settings. He provided a wealth of external resources and code snippets that are too numerous to list here but, if you want to learn more about how to take control of your own web typography, all the info he presented can be found in the blog posts linked above.
If there is one thing to learn from Elliot’s talk, it’s that designers have the power (and the responsibility) to define and pave the way for the future of web typography. Elliot will soon be launching a centralized resource on web typography at advancedwebtypography.com, as well as a book on the subject. Follow @elliotjaystocks on Twitter for updates.