A typography study on known websites

Typography is very important for websites, mainly because is the best way to help users to read easily and to focus on the important parts of the text. Another aspect of the typography is that it makes the text beautiful and can give the user the needed mood to read and understand the message.

Here is a quick research on what fonts and font sizes are using some of the best known websites by designers:

apple.com

Apple is using Lucida Grande and Lucida Sans Unicode as primary fonts, starting with a font size of just 10px for the footer links, 12px for some elements like the secondary menu, 14px – 16px for paragraphs and 22px – 24px for most of the headings, excepting those displayed as pictures.

google.com

Google is a lot more classy, using Arial as primary font and small font sizes (12-13px). Even YouTube is using the same standards. Other Google pages are using another font: open sans and more appealing headings and styles.

smashingmagazine.com

This well known website uses Proxima Nova with fallback to Helvetica Neue and Arial. The headings font is Skolar. The font size for paragraphs is 16px, and 32px for the headings.

twitter.com

Twitter is using Helvetica Neue with Arial fallback for the content pages. The most common font sizes are 14px and 16px for paragraphs and 40px – 20px for headings.

graphicriver.com

Graphicriver as well as other Envato websites is more conservative by using Tahoma and small fonts (13px) for paragraphs, but for the big headings is using ProximaNovaSoft font and 38px size, while other headings have 24px and Helvetica Neue.

 

Pinterest is the fastest growing website?

You didn’t known much about Pinterest until a few months ago, don’t you? Then you may not know that it is the fastest growing website in the world!

Pinterest interface

Here is some history:

The project started back in December 2009 and the first beta release was made in March 2010. Although the start up was slow and painful (one of the founders personally wrote the first 5000 invitations), Pinterest had it’s first 10,000 users after just 9 months. After that, the investors tried to sell Pinterest to a magazine publishing company from New York, but the deal was not even discussed because of no interest from the publisher. They had no way of knowing what’s about to come next!

On March 2011 the Pinterest team released an iPhone app that brought a lot of traffic, much more than anticipated, following that on December 2011 Pinterest will enter in the top 10 largest social websites, with 11 million visits per week.

Nowadays the company raised $120 million in funding, is moving in a large building and is passing $1.5 billion on the stock market. Awesome isn’t it?

And for your own knowledge, most of the Pinterest’s traffic is made by women: just over 80%!

I personally use Pinterest for inspiration, curiosity and image sharing. I find it very intuitive and easy to use, but more important very relaxing. Maybe this is why it is growing so fast. Now I am just curious what will happen next.

Simple web elements – free download

It is very useful when I need something nice but free for my working project or just to learn how others do it, and I search on Google and find it! Now is my turn to start giving something back to the community, and here it is!

Simple Web ElementsI’ve done a simple web elements design that seems to be very appreciated on deviantArt, counting over 2000 downloads in 6 months. You can download it for free here by clicking on the Download File link.

The included elements are:

  • buttons
  • form elements (select, textarea, checkbox, radio)
  • newsletter box
  • error messages
  • slider

I hope to enjoy it and feel free to comment here or on my deviantArt page. I have more interesting stuff to share with you in the near future, and I also recommend you to share all the valuable stuff you can. Someday good things will happen because of that 🙂

Outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing…

Outsourcing is probably the best solution in the world for cheap but quality web design and development services.

The advantages of web design outsourcing are many for both contractors and clients:

  • the ability to provide services at a cheaper price while still keeping both the quality  and profitability
  • both parts can communicate by email, voice or chat anywhere on the globe – there is no need to be physically in touch
  • there are a lot of freelancers and companies available
  • there are many specialized websites that are connecting the clients with the providers
  • you can work securely using milestones and escrows
  • as client you can get a lot of proposals to choose from, before starting the work on the project.
  • there are a lot of projects and clients on the market
  • outsourcing is very scalable, so you can work for short periods of time or long term, with one ore more customers or providers

There are also some drawbacks about outsourcing:

  • the lack of control, people involved being less attached to the project
  • there can be problems with privacy and security when working with overseas teams
  • communication can be a problem because of the language differences and time zone.

Here are the best online outsourcing websites: