Brian M. Curran wrote: > Can anyone suggest a CSS font treatment to my home page quotes, that > would jazz them up and make them more appealing? > > www.draftingservices.com
I think there are at least three problems with the rendering of blockquote elements on that page: 1) Their font size is larger than that of copy text, emphasizing them too much. While it might be argued that 110% size is suitable for Times New Roman when the overall copy text font is Arial (because Times New Roman is smaller than Arial of the same size, in the sense that letters are smaller in the average), the same is not true for Georgia. One of the fundamental problems in practical CSS is that when you set, say, font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman" you cannot know which font will be used. How can you set font size, line height, and other properties well, then. Well, you cannot. Listing several font families is mostly illusionary. It is often better to use just one font family, possibly backed up with a generic name serif or sans-serif when relevant, and selecting a font that will be available in most browsing situations, and then design other properties accordingly. Alternate fonts usually make sense only when they are reasonably similar to the primary font (like Helvetica and Arial fonts, which is largely just variations or implementations of a theme). 2) The font is rather different from that of copy text, namely (Helvetica Neue or) Arial. While font differences can convey a message, too big a difference may carry a wrong message. Ideally, if you use both a serif font and a sans-serif font for text on a page, they should be compatible by design, like the "C fonts" are. But since "C fonts" are not in use widely enough, I would actually use Times New Roman for blockquote here. 3) The column width is too narrow, causing rather great variations in line length. This is bad for esthetics and bad for readability. If you cannot increase the width, then you might check how much it helps to insert a few soft hyphes in critical places, to have some long words hyphenated. (Using Times New Roman instead of Georgia helps a little, but just a little, due to the somewhat smaller average width of characters.) -- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [[email protected]] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
