I bought a new font this weekend. I bought Tungsten from the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry. It cost me USD $99 – a sum of cash that isn’t going to break the bank, but considering there is a very real chance that I may end up never using the typeface in a commercial, money-making project, it’s not an amount to be sniffed at either.

Tungsten is the latest in only a very small handful of commercial fonts that I have ever bought. Considering I work in the creative industry, I don’t think I’ve bought many fonts at all. But I expect I’ve bought more than many others – especially other web designers.

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If you’re a conscientious web designer or developer who cares about accessibility, then I’m sure you’ve spent the last few years drilling yourself into the habit of using relative font sizes (EMs or percentages) rather than absolute font sizes (pixels – PX)?

Now with the advent of modern browsers and full page zooming (as opposed to just text scaling), I’m sure I’m not the only person that’s been wondering whether we still need to be going through the painstaking task of calculating relative font sizes?

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The days of the ever resourceful all-in-one web designer-come-developer extraordinaire are long gone. In this industry the general consensus is that a great developer doth not a great designer make (and visa-versa).

It’s more common for designers and developers to work side-by-side collaboratively in web design harmony. Or not as the case may be. Designers tend to make developers jobs as fiddly as possible and developers have a knack for screwing up great designs.

It doesn’t have to be that way, here are five tips designers can follow to make developers’ jobs easier and ensure the site turns out as great as you intended.

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Rather than add to the already filled-to-the-brim Digg bin of top 10 tips for web design, I thought it would be interesting to look at what YOU think are your top tips for web design.

Johnathon Longnecker in Top 10 tips for creating kick awesome websites says:

“Your web typography will set your design apart from other studios. Study optimum line heights, widths and look for inventive ways to guide the viewer through your layout only using CSS rules. Flash replacement (sIFR) is alright, but don’t overuse it.”

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