Typography can make or break your design. It's really one of the things that separates a seasoned designer from a newbie who still has a lot to learn about design. It can take years to learn to see how the type choices you make end up affecting the rest of your design, or to see how large face type can be used to dramatic effectiveness as a design element. Check out these fantastic examples of great typography that we've culled from our inspiration gallery.

What exactly is typography?

1. the design, theory, and art of creating characters for printing.
2. the design and selection of printed matter.
3. the craft or business of composing type.

In web design, you can use type in a lot of different ways. You use the type for body text, headlines, subheads, callouts, bylines, tool tips and much more. You can also use type as a very effective design element. Ultra large type can be beautiful, striking, exciting and it can be one of the most wonderful design tricks in your bag. A lot of the designs below show this. 

Small type matters because there's a lot of it - big type matters as a visual design element

That's not to say that you need to choose a lesser known font all the time, a widely used font like Arial is definitely the right choice sometimes - it's a great clean and versatile font. But take the time to try your design with a wide selection of body text fonts.

You will need to import the font into your page if it's not one of the standard system fonts

All that said, here are the typography examples: