Mindy McAdams gave a lecture on typography in her Advanced Online Media class.
The highlights:
- text is expressive
- choose text for legibility and readability — you must both entice readers and make it easy for them to continue reading.
- using all caps, italics, or small text reduces readability
- coordinate text size with line length – smaller text for short lines of text, larger text for longer lines
- use CSS to control line and letter spacing
- be careful with the fonts you specify in your CSS. Choose fonts that can be viewed on all computers and don’t specify different font-families for one piece of text.
McAdams also recommended this chapter from the Web Style Guide as a typography resource.