A typographic starter kit

I stumbled across Typeplate in, I think, my twitter feed. It is as it says a typographic starter kit and I have for a pretty long time been looking for one just like it.

Typeplate has some great ‘defaults’ for base type, typographic scale, color, word-wrap, indenting, hyphenation, small capitals, block quotes, pull quotes and such that can be a bit cumbersome to hash out yourself in css.

What I like about it is that it doesn’t focus on looks and design, it focuses purely on the typographic side of text.

We don’t make aesthetic design choices, but define proper markup with extensible styling for common typographic patterns.

One thing that made me extra happy is that it also references OpenTypography which is a project focused on micro-typography I initiated a while back. OpenTypography works as a very nice complement to Typeplate. But since the current OpenTypography solution is built upon a not-so-very-performance-friendly client-side Javascript solution I have spent some time rebuilding it as a server-side php-solution.

I’m currently using Typeplace on this site even though my initial super-sparse typography and visual design doesn’t give it the justice it needs. But I will incorporate the php version of OpenTypography further down the road and then I might get write a follow up on Typeplate.

So make sure to have a look at Typeplate and also read up on OpenTypography.