Jason Beaird does a wonderful job of outlining the basics of typography in chapter 4 of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. He also offers some good rules of thumb on sizing fonts with his 62.5% body font trick. Essentially, this is coded into the html, making one em the equivalent of 10 pixels; this in turn makes wrapping your head around the size easier because you just move a decimal point to get the size (12 pixels equal 1.2 ems and so forth). I am not one for difficult math, so this trick is a great one.
Beaird also suggests some great free font websites and I have spent a good deal of time downloading fonts that are free and in the public domain from dafont.com. I am a sucker for fonts and have many installed in my every growing font book; using those fonts, however, is a different story. I am never quite comfortable with choosing the right solution, no matter how much I think about the meaning and look. His suggestions about considering the meaning of the text and the feel of the place or topic are helpful, but it is still a daunting prospect. Readability is a factor that certainly kills some choices, so practical considerations help narrow things down a bit. My first logo font for my website (a script) for example, seems too difficult to read now that I sit back and look at the results. Instead I am searching for a cleaner, but still flowing, script to replace the title. I am leaning towards a font called Riesling; it seems to project the right image. And as Beaird suggests, there are probably several choices that would work for the same project, so the key is more to avoid the really bad ideas than to get too wrapped up in the idea of perfection.
Check out some awesome free fonts here:
www.dafont.com
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