When we bring up web design, most people don’t realize that typography is smack dab in the middle. I feel like developers need to learn at least the basics of typography just as much as the designers do. It is expected from everyone that designers have typography skills, they are expected to know how to type set and when to choose certain typefaces, how to shape a paragraph, how to scale a paragraph, and how to use grids to establish rhythm in their work. Being a designer myself, I can admit that I don’t know all of those things. A Lot of designers are self taught, what was a hobby ends up becoming their career and don’t realize how important typography is. In my case and many others, we went to school and studied graphic design, but only say typography as a class we needed to pass.

Whatever us designers design for a website has to be given to a developer and turned into code. They don’t get to just print it out, or click a button that turns our text into code. It is EXTREMELY rare to find someone who knows design and code well. Even if you find a designer who knows every in and out of typography, that doesn’t mean they have any idea how to turn that text into code. Therefore, a lot of that falls onto the web developer, who aren’t expected nor taught how to do this stuff. As hard as they try, a lot of the time these web developers miss the small details that to us designers make a huge difference. All of this being said, don’t you think it’s about time that we stop leaving the web developers out of the design process? A design process isn’t something that the designers own, it should be something that everyone can be a part of and contribute to. No web developer should ever be afraid to look at the designer and tell them “this design doesn’t make sense, but what if we do this or this”. No designer should ever be afraid to sit down with the web developer and help them with typography. If everyone works together as a team, we can all learn from each other.