I’m on record saying, “Refereeing soccer is the only job I’ve ever had that didn’t feel like work.” I mainly did 4A high school soccer in South Carolina. I loved it. It was a great escape from the academic rigors of college.
The beauty of great refereeing is that you don’t even realize the referee is even present in the game. He feels more like a sideline coach than an player on the pitch (field), in that he doesn’t interfere with the flow of play. He’s the punctuation in the sentence of the game, not the words themselves.
I don’t mean that the referee never calls a foul, flashes a yellow card, or signals a penalty kick for a foul in the 18-yard area. Those actions are necessary. But his real job is to conduct the flow of the game and to keep it in bounds with respect to the rules of the game. This is the true test of great refereeing — inconspicuousness.
Goal of Typography
Even though we live in an American culture of “Look at me!”, you should avoid fonts that cry out for attention. They fail the true test of typography. If you leave a site remembering the font, the designer failed. Miserably. Fonts exist to communicate. (See Monday’s post) If you get off the phone with your significant other and you remember how nice the phone was, you’ve missed the point of the phone call entirely.
Rules for Well Set Type on the Web (a layman’s list)
- Stay within one font family.
- Use different styles within your choice of font family to communicate a hierarchy of information. (See yesterday’s post)
- Only change colors when it is absolutely necessary to do so.
- Conduct a 5-second test. Through this site, you can have friends or strangers view your website home page for 5 seconds and then enter what they remember about the site. If the participants mention the font itself at all, you should consider changing it. In 5 seconds, no one should notice the font.
A good font is inconspicuous on a website, since it highlights and communicates what is most important on that website, which is never the font itself.
