« Elastic Images
Stylish Accessible Buttons »

Lesson learnt from downloading fonts from a German website

Of late. there have been a few good art­icles of typo­graphy and typo­graphy resources like that of Particle­Tree. Fol­low­ing the from one links I ended up on the Ger­man Font­shop site try­ing to down­load some free fonts not avail­able elsewhere.

Not a prob­lem I thought, just use babelfish.altravista.com to trans­late the web pages on the fly it will be easy. That idea fell at the first hurdle, the preview/select font for down­load is done in flash. Once I worked out you need to tell the flash applic­a­tion how many CPU’s you inten­ded to use the fonts on (I was greedy I said 2, both Mac & PC), the next thing you had to do was register. Other than hav­ing to change my the post­code from 6167 to 12247. I man­aged to nav­ig­ate the seven part regis­tra­tion down­load pro­cess without need­ing any trans­la­tion (all these pages where HTML and cap­able of trans­la­tion) because the pro­cess was logical and at the end of each page was two but­tons, the one on left in red took you back a step the one on the right in green took you to the next step.

That got me think­ing about usab­il­ity and using col­our to con­vey addi­tional inform­a­tion. As a web designer you are bom­barded that you should not use col­our to con­vey inform­a­tion, because around 12% of the pop­u­la­tion have prob­lems dis­tin­gush­ing col­ours. As such a lot of web design­ers do not even try to use col­our to con­vey addi­tional inform­a­tion. Which is a shame, because col­our is a tool that you can use to make it more intu­it­ive for the remain­ing 88% of the population.

Just don’t say press the green but­ton to start, oth­er­wise you are not only dis­ad­vatanging people with col­our defi­cen­cies but also users of Safari and Cam­ino because of the way they render but­tons. OK that makes it roughly 20% of users can not see col­oured but­tons, but the other 80% still have a can get the addi­tional con­tex­tual inform­a­tion that col­our allows. Below the but­tons I have also included screen shots from Fire­fox and Camino.

But­ton exper­i­ment
Fire­fox Buttons

Firefox buttons

Cam­ino Buttons

Camino buttons

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2005 at 11:08 pm and is filed under usability . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Lesson learnt from downloading fonts from a German website”

  1. Derek Featherstone Says:
    November 20th, 2005 at 1:03 am

    Hi, Nick!

    Great example! The “don’t use col­our to con­vey inform­a­tion” seems to be suf­fer­ing from the same myth “don’t use tables!” There are good places to use col­our just as there are good places to use tables.

    Look­ing at the Cam­ino but­tons (and know­ing that Safari will be much the same) — I’m won­der­ing if we can rely on pos­i­tion alone to indic­ate func­tion? Do you think it is enough to know that in Ger­man, the lan­guage is read from left to right and that right implies mov­ing for­ward and left would be back? Would it be dif­fer­ent in a lan­guage that reads right to left? Would we present but­tons dif­fer­ently there? Haha — your small post has me buzz­ing with questions!!

  2. Ben Buchanan Says:
    November 21st, 2005 at 8:36 pm

    I think the point that is often lost is that you should not con­vey mean­ing with col­our alone. Using col­our for those who can see it just seems to get thrown out with the pro­ver­bial bathwater.

    As for instruc­tions… I would say ‘click the green but­ton’ is poor copy. Bet­ter copy would be ‘click the Anfang but­ton’ since that will work for anyone.

  3. RE Mogul Says:
    June 26th, 2008 at 7:07 am

    There are thou­sands of fonts that are FREE & SUPER EZ to get.

    Don’t bother with the rest.

  4. Nick Says:
    June 26th, 2008 at 9:00 pm

    RE Mogul, this post is about user experience.

    As for fonts, not all fonts are cre­ated equal. You need to start here I Love Typo­graphy and keep read­ing Typo­graph­ica and Typo­phile.

  5. RE Mogul Says:
    June 27th, 2008 at 1:19 am

    Awe­some Links ! Graci !

    I real­ized the entire argu­ment is a moot point.

    Less is always more, on the web.

    The truth: the red but­ton above is not needed. Your browser already has a red but­ton — the close-window button/ back but­ton. A state­ment to this effect could be included in the text, which would be accord­ingly ignored, by most users.

    This leaves only the green but­ton. Since there is only one but­ton: it doesn’t mat­ter what it says or what color it is — as there is only one.

    Since the win­dow (by good design) is not a pop-up it will not cause much pause before click­ing the one but­ton — it is JUST THE INTERNET after all. I’ve never had any qualms about click­ing a but­ton while on the inter­net, on legit sites.

    If one also make the page default to: focus on green but­ton, then a simple enter key would solve everything. The enter arrow is uni­ver­sal. This would make use of another fant­astic and very use­ful but­ton — the enter key.

Affiliates

Google
text advertising by
Powered by Reseller Zoom