Whilst modernist designers (particularly regarding the Swiss/International ‘style’ of design) will ultimately look to convey the message in the most effective manner possible, others will argue that the attractiveness of the design is what will attract the reader, and from there they would have already been enticed to read the content.

wolfgang Weingart once argued that the relatively high stimulus of some of his designs made up for there illegibility. Whilst Weingart’s work is somewhat different to the web

, I see this as a tactic still employed on the web.

Personally, I agree with you wholeheartedly, and would love to see more typographic discipline on the web, but sadly I feel it is some time away yet, especially with the popularity of content management systems (and ‘themes’) making the task even harder.

Great post though.

Kev

Hope you don’t mind if I jump in on the discussion mate, I have a question!

What do you suggest we can do to change things for the better, when it comes to pushing for typographical consideration throughout the design of a project?

Sometimes the structure of a project might prevent all the efforts in the world, regardless of how we might want to improve the situation.

In large organisations I guess this would involve introducing a specialist into the mix, but I’m not sure how to achieve the same benefit in a smaller team.

Do we try to cross-train everyone?

Well I think it is a problem apply a different style to different type of contents in a site … for the question Micheal J say in his comment (I mean content generated from a DB) and also because would be horrible apply a different style on different page of same website…

I think it is much better than navigator can choose style of the site … and adapt it to his way to see this website (I mean … change color, font or template of the site)

http://www.basement.org/2007/10/if_the_web_is_tv_then_rss_is_r.html

indeed, like background music in a film, the job was to

communicate the structure implicitly, subconsciously…

which means that one can also understand the structure

of the content by careful examination of its typography.

i encounter this all the time when looking at image-sets

of books that’ve been scanned, and laugh at the people

who consider content and presentation as dual entities,

just because that is a model they now wish to impose…

you can think of love and sex separately if you want, too,

but you miss a lot of the point when you do it that way…

-bowerbird

When visual design is the last station on the project-conveyor-belt, a “theme” or “skin” is probably the only thing that’s left to do.

Formal separation of content and design or no, the way to go seems to be to get the visual designers involved with the information architects from the start – and maybe allow a coder in the room for good measure.

HansI meant to put a grab of abriefmessage.com in here as it goes some way towards what I’m talking about. You’re right, there is a big difference between designed content instead of nicely framed content.