Paravel has just wrapped up an exciting secret project with three of the web's most talented designers: Jason Santa Maria, Frank Chimero, and Naz Hamid. These designs are epic, like 18,123px epic. Working with these guys was a complete joy. There were a few fun development challenges and - as you might expect from these gentlemen - a lot of fancy typography work in the delivered PSDs.

Before Trent and I marked up the designs, we noticed that in many instances we would need to style individual letters. We decided we'd need a system to keep our markup maintainable. Something agile enough that a text change wouldn't ruin us. Our solution was to call upon the power of Javascript to insert some easy to remember span tags.

Individual Letter Control with Lettering.js

We developed a really simple, lightweight, easy to use jQuery plugin, we're calling it "Lettering Dot JS", and we're releasing it today for free over on Github. Let me demo it for you: </stevejobs>

We'll start with some really basic markup:

<h1 class="fancy_title">Some Title</h1>

After including jQuery, download and include the minified version of Lettering.js, then a script block:

<script src="path/to/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> <script src="path/to/jquery.lettering.min.js"></script> <script> $(document).ready(function() { $(".fancy_title").lettering(); }); </script>

The resulting code will churn your .fancy_title and output the following:

<h1 class="fancy_title"> <span class="char1">S</span> <span class="char2">o</span> <span class="char3">m</span> <span class="char4">e</span> <span class="char5"></span> <span class="char6">T</span> <span class="char7">i</span> <span class="char8">t</span> <span class="char9">l</span> <span class="char10">e</span> </h1>

Magical. Now the text is easy to manipulate in your CSS using an ordinal .char# pattern. This plugin assumes basic counting skills, but it's a pretty fast and easy way to get control over every letter.

As you can imagine, it would be a pain in the ass to have all those spans littering your markup and a nightmare to maintain. If the client came by the next day and said that the SEO Expert demands that you have to change the title to "Cool Title", it'd just be a matter of changing the original clean markup to:

<h1 class="fancy_title">Cool Title</h1>

It also plays nicely with CMSs like WordPress or Expression Engine and art direction plugins.

Wrap Words with Lettering.js

Once we developed this e-solution and played with it, we found it useful enough to broaden the scope so that we could break apart and wrap words in a sentence in a span tag.

Here's an example of the .lettering('words') method:

<p class="word_split">Don't break my heart.</p> <script> $(document).ready(function() { $(”.word_split”).lettering(‘words’); }); </script>

Which will generate:

<p class="word_split"> <span class="word1">Don't</span> <span class="word2">break</span> <span class="word3">my</span> <span class="word4">heart.</span> </p>

You can then style each word using the .word# class.

Wrap Lines with Lettering.js

Once word wrapping was complete, noticed the need for yet another method, one that would break lines up mid-sentence. We struggled for a semantic way to do this, but then remembered <br> tag which a semantic way to say "break this line". Similar to the above examples where lines of text are broken up by either non-breaking spaces or individual letters, the lettering('lines') method will create breakpoints at <br> tags:

<p class="line_split">Are you<br/> ready to<br/> RUMmMmMMBBLE!</p> <script> $(document).ready(function() { $(".line_split").lettering('lines'); }); </script>

Resulting code:

<p class="line_split"> <span class="line1">Are you</span> <span class="line2">ready to</span> <span class="line3">RUMmMmMMBBLE!</span> </p>

Kern Well

If you're going through the trouble to load a fancy font and that word or phrase is the largest on the site, then it's important for it to be kerned well. With Lettering.js, kerning is a breeze. You can simply use $("#id-of-what-i-want-to-kern").lettering(); and then on each .char# , you can set relative position or left/right margin. Works like a charm.

Best Practices

We've found this to be a pretty quick and elegant solution to create typographical CSS3 posters. It's also a great solution for really custom type headings, while keeping the text selectable.

Be smart and use sparingly. You'll probably break your browser if you try to tried to do wrap every letter on your page in a span tag, so don't do that. Look to use this in your Headings, Blockquotes, Asides, etc.

Non-Javascript Fallback

As with any kind of Javascript, have a fall back plan in case the user doesn't have javascript enabled. The bottom line is up to you, my bottom line would be "legible and on the screen". Also, use lettering.min.js : Download the minified version of Lettering.js here.

Performance Anti-Pattern

Web performance patterns advise that you put Javascripts at the bottom of your page before your </body> tag. There is an unfortunate side effect where you may experience a FOUT (Flash of Unstyled Text) when you're manipulating your text after the DOM has loaded. Unfortunately, we found the best solution to avoid/minimize the FOUT caused by this plugin is to put your scripts (jQuery, Lettering.js) in the document <head> . On the one hand, your page will load slower. On the other hand, a flash/restyling makes your site feel slow. Users might ultimately feel the site is faster if they don't see the FOUT.

Download, Fork, Commit, Please.

We really want Lettering.js to be a quality helper for web typography. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please leave those over on the Github. We're excited about typography on the web and want to help make it print quality.

Download on Github

Thanks to Paul Irish for code review!