The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

Among the almost infinite list of HTML entities, the non-breaking space ( ) is one of the most popular but very little understood.

The correct place for a   is, for instance, in “Mr. Smith”. The   will avoid a line break between Mr. and Smith, while leaving a space between them.

The non-breaking space earned its fame because in the dark days of the table layouts people needed to put content on certain elements without visual rendering.

As the normal space is discarded by the browser in most situations an entity like the non-braking space, which is always considered and yet has no shape was very welcome to leave a gutter.

Yet, the   should not be used to leave gutters. While it is quick and easy to put them, is really a nightmare to upgrade, because markup and presentation are all mixed. The role of the non-breaking space is actually to bind things together and not so separate them.

Art is not design, and vice-versa. There are many intersecting points between both, but they have different purposes.

Art and design may often borrow elements one from each other, but ultimately, there are two separated things.

Design means usability, not ornamentation. However, ornamentation may be play a huge role on usability.

Art is an expression of the self. That is why art is so often developed by single individuals or, less often by a very small group, generally a duo. And that is why a lot of duos or groups break up very soon, and sometimes not without fights.

While the purpose of art is to draw the attention to itself, to make the viewer to forget the world for a while and concentrate on it, the purpose of design is just to sit there, without being noticed, while the viewer pays attention to something else.
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I have just finished reading Robert Bringhurst’s book Elements of Typographic Style, a classic book and essential guide on typography.

Being typography an art over half a millenium old and being the natural heir of the millenar legacy of scribes, there is plenty to learn from history when typesseting a text.

Any good designer knows that desing is much more than just good taste and typography is no exception.

Much of what pleases us is related to natural (biological) factors and is generally universal and somehow unvariable over history. Another good part is cultural, which ends up in history again to understand its dynamics.

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Typography is one of my favourite subjects in design. The role of typography is fundamental on every piece of design in which is contained.

In fact, typography is so powerful that you can do an entire image based solely on types.

I’ve done this “flower” in just a few minutes, quick and simple on Times New Roman types, inspired by the cover art of Jeremy Keith’s book “DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model“.

In fact, I am looking for good typography books, please leave your suggestions.