Great Web Typography- P7:When you design a page for print, you control the size of the paper and the placement of the elements. But on the Web, the size, resolution, fonts, and even the layout of your page can vary with the browser and the system used to view your site. | 160 Part III Graphic Type for the Web Working with Antialiasing Any element that is displayed on a monitor is made up of thousands of litde squares or pixels. When you look at a rectangle on a monitor many litde boxes add up to the shape you see . Because the sides of the object are straight they appear crisp and clean to your eye. A curve or diagonal shape does not fare as well however. There is no such thing as a half pixel so the curve must be approximated with square pixels . Without intervention the result is jagged edges. Antialiasing compensates for the square nature of pixels by adding pixels at the edge of an object to blend the color of the object with the background dS. Behind the Scenes Joe Gillespie King of the Crisp Clean Font World If you have ever worked with a pixel font the odds are great that the creator of that font was Joe Gillespie. Joe lives in London England just a few yards from the River Thames overlooking a 16th century church graveyard. He works from a home office mainly doing consulting work now. He came to the Web design world first from a traditional graphic design background leaping to multimedia just as it started. Joe s clients have included Apple Computer Canon Sony and Microsoft and he was the driving force behind a project for the Daily Telegraph a major London newspaper. This project resulted in the launch of the Electronic Telegraph the first major newspaper to publish on the Web early in the 1990s. Joe s background in both traditional and multimedia have meshed perfectly for creating the fonts that have made things much more clear on our Web pages. He understands how important traditional typography is to communication but has pioneer experience with the demands that monitor display places on fonts. Designers are lucky that Joe chooses to relax from his work by designing fonts for the Web. Chapter 9 Creating Graphic Text for the Web 161 color. Your eyes see a blend of the high and low contrast pixels between .
