Since I have a background in user experience design, I have had a bit of exposure to traditional graphic design, including typography and page layout. In fact I was a crazy early adopter of sIFR, which used Flash to bring alternate typefaces to the web back before there was widespread support for @font-face.
This is a pretty rich topic and I will talk about it in more depth later. For now, here are a few tips and tools to get you going.
First, know that there are a lot of punctuation characters available to you that aren't obvious from just looking at the keys on your keyboard. A great resource that I use is Copy Paste Character, which basically does what the title says. Here are a few characters I recommend you use. I also include the key combos on a US Mac keyboard to type them so you don't have to copy/paste every time.
Middle dot ·
Very useful as a delimiter in a · horizontal · list · of · items. It's much more elegant than using - hyphens - or worse | pipes | If you would like a bit more breathing room around the dots, try using an en space like · this.
shift option 9
Em dash —
The proper way to delineate an aside in a sentence—such as this one, for example—when it is more important than parentheses would imply, or when it includes a comma. Please do not use a hyphen or two hyphens. You shouldn't use spaces around it either, but if you must, use thin spaces like — this.
shift option -
En dash –
Use this for delineating ranges of numbers (3–5 players) or in times (8–10 pm).
option -
Proper quotation marks, aka “smart” or ‘curly’ quotes
If you just type " on your keyboard, you end up with “dumb” or ‘straight’ quotes. Proper quotes look great will set you apart from the crowd.
option [ · option { · option ] · option }
Proper fractions: ½ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾ …
Using standard numbers and a slash to create fractions just looks clumsy and inelegant in comparison, partly because you must include a space so they are readable: 3 1/2 vs. 3½. You can even use bigger denominators—⅕ ⅙ ⅐ ⅛ ⅑ ⅒—but few fonts will support them, so they are likely to show up in the fallback Unicode font for that system, like Arial or Lucida Grande.
That should get you started. Next time we can talk about emjoi 😊
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