NOTE: There’s some CSS trickery going on here with the Moby Dick text excerpt. Your RSS reader will probably not display this correctly. I recommend you open this page in your browser for best effect.
MOBY DICK
By Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster-tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
I spent a couple of hours this morning making some oh-so-subtle tweaks to the typography on the Perpetual βeta. There were quirks that have been irritating me for a while now, that I have finally addressed.
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t
Let me tell you something about typography that may surprise you: good typography is invisible.
Think about that for a moment. The purpose of typography to is make the message accessible; the glyphs; typeface; media… all fade away, leaving nothing to detract from the author’s message.
We do notice when the typography is bad. We do notice rivers of white-space, widows, orphans or bad hyphenation in a text. We know that reading requires an effort when the line-height is too great or small, lines are too long or the contrast between the text and the background upon which it sits is too low.
The average reader might not be able to identify what it is that’s wrong with a body of text, she’ll just notice that it’s a struggle to read.
That’s what we endeavour to prevent with good typography.
The Typeface is Not Typography
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “typography is a multi-faceted discipline of which choosing typefaces is but a small part.”
It’s true, one can make a body of text look beautiful with a carefully chosen typeface. But, conversely, that same typeface can have a negative impact on readability. If it’s too ornate, for example, or simply incompatible with the media with which one is working.
Websites that use gorgeous typefaces but have poor typography are abundant on the Web. I wish their designers and content producers would invest more time and effort in correcting this.
In Closing
Again, good typography is invisible.
Hopefully then, you won’t notice any of the tweaks I have made this morning. They should not stand out in any way. They should enhance, not detract from, your reading experience.
Afterword
The text excerpt in the hero image1 is from the all-time classic novel, “Moby Dick; or, The Whale” by Herman Melville. If you haven’t read it, or at least seen one of the multitude of film versions, then I wholeheartedly recommend you do, at the earliest opportunity. There’s no excuse, the text is available online.
The “hero image” isn’t actually an image at all. It’s real text. You can select and copy it into your clipboard. I have borrowed the cool CSS — that gives it that almost photo-realistic look — from an article by Lucas Bebber titled “Creating Realistic Text with CSS.” I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s a pretty neat effect. ↩