It is not about choosing one of the many free fonts available online!

There are a great deal of misconceptions about the use of typefaces and sometimes it can bring our creative director to tears when clients don't understand their value. Many people are convinced that choosing a typeface is a question of taste and that being able to recognise a typeface that represents their company is a natural human instinct given to us all. That is absolute nonsense!

Typefaces are like other cultural artefacts - music, paintings or the design of a car. They belong to our cultural heritage and can be placed within certain periods of time and associated with particular usage. It takes time to recognise what their cultural history is and where they come from. To complicate matters further there are typfaces that are more subtle and for the layman it is difficult to decipher why they are useful and for what kind of project they should be selected.

We pay attention to the correct usage of good typographic values!

There are many different aspects to the usage of typography - many companies and organisations use it to create their identity - two prime examples of completely different usages of very similar typefaces can be found by looking at the usage of early twentieth century sans serif gothic typefaces. Everybody is familiar with Chanel and the sophisticated and elegant modernist feel of their products and business concerns, but then take a look at the typeface the London Underground System uses, it is a similar typeface but helps you to read signs easily and find your way around a complex transport network! These are just two examples of how important the correct usage of typography can help your customers and clients to identify your business ethos and how seriously you pay attention to their needs and desires.

A word about the web and accessibility

The world wide web was created by a bunch of geeky scientists led by Tim Berners-Lee at Cern in Switzerland. They created it so that the scientists working in many different places could talk to each other and swop ideas about complicated physics related issues. Good news for science - bad news for visual designers!

Today, as designers, we still live with the consequences of this momentous idea - in fact we have gained enormous value from it! But we have also come into a legacy that puts a patch over one eye and ties both our hands behind our backs when it comes to designing for the web.

The range of typefaces available to realistically create web pages is very limited - but we have learnt to deal with it and every few years new technologies become available to present information online in ways that are as flexible as when we deal with paper. All our websites are created using CSS (cascading style sheets), a very powerful tool for a designer to layout a page for the web.

As a result of this technology we can provide various levels of accessibility to our clients. All our basic web sites already come with high standards of accessibility but if you have a user base that demands something extra please let us know about the kinds of standards you wish to meet and what the demographic is of your end-users. In some cases we may find it necessary to bring in expert advice to complete more complex projects.

All our websites are created to be semantically correct so they meet many of the standards required for search engine optimisation. Clients should also be aware that SEO is a separate field of expertise and more to do with marketing strategies - we can help and advise in this area but it is not what we are paid to do - our sites are built to support other aspects of your business model - that is what we do best!

Interested in finding out more?

There is a great deal of information out there about all of the subjects touched upon in the above page. We are compiling a list of useful resources for clients that need to know more or wish to find out about what kinds of other services they may need.