I’ve never claimed the title of web designer. I find good designers to work with on projects, but I’m very slowly stepping into the realm of web design. Sure, I’ve designed a few sites, am pretty good with Photoshop, have an art degree, a professional photography career and worked with some very talented people, but that isn’t the same as being a designer, although it hasn’t hurt. As part of my continuing education in design, I study typefaces; good designers use type well and type is tough – so many choices – so much bad use.

Type is so important. It is the thing people stare at most when looking at a web page and the web is not type friendly. The low, screen resolution destroys subtlety in rastorized type and the limited variety of system fonts for HTML text can be boring. However, new web design trends have focused more on typography. Mixing serif and sans-serif styles in unique ways, oversized headline type, pixel fonts and CSS techniques haven given the web new flavor and improved readability.

I have found several notable font resources in my quest to learn more about type. Here are a few favorites:

http://www.fontlover.com/ - portal

http://www.fontscape.com/ - portal

http://store.adobe.com/type/index.html - nice histories for each face

http://www.emigre.com/ - cool type foundry

http://www.p22.com/ - artistic fonts

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx - yes, Microsoft. They have a nice resource list and have been doing quite a bit of R & D into new screen type faces.