The advent of mobile devices gave birth to minimalistic CSS styles such as Flat UI or Material Design by Google.
The motives are rather practical. In the responsive web design era, it is not certain how big an element will eventually be and what the rendering capabilities of a device will be.
Ornament-rich graphics, in combination with today’s imperfect workflow, would gobble up lot of money.
Many web developers complain about this approach because it seems limiting from the graphical point of view. On the one hand, that is true. On the other, the web environment has experienced the arrival of a new tool - a new tool for the web, but an old one for other, different media types. It is called typography.
Typography offers a wide range of possibilities for passing on information together with emotion or feeling, from the choice of typeface to correct pairing of fonts and CSS3/SVG effects.
In this e-book, we will take a look at typography from the technical point of
view, dealing with the @font-face CSS3 property. However, bear in mind that
typography is also extremely interesting from the graphical point of view. If
you want to dig into this topic, I suggest you start at
webtypography.net.