: On which occasions would you use italics in web design? In which occasions you would like to use italics in web design? Because the use of bold fonts is quite obvious not sure about italics.

@Vandalay110

I see two components to this question:


When to use italics in general
When to use italics on the web


No.1 falls under general typography for which many resources exist, too many to list here and I'm assuming you already understand. Italics in web context specifically, I'd say, fundamentally there is no major difference in how you use it. It's a form of emphasis, more subtle than bold, follow the same principles of good typography. That being said, a few notable differences to keep in mind:


Alternatives: when you need subtle emphasis, there are alternatives on the web which don't exist in print (not easily or are technically too difficult to be economically viable) such as a subtle colour change not far off the base colour.
Uncommon: Italics on the web are rare (compared to print). Due to that, they have a bit of a nostalgic feel to them, that's something to both keep in mind as well as use when situation calls for it.
Technical: due to the nature of font rendering, italics tend to have lower legibility for display text (as opposed to print), be conservative with them as you approach smaller point sizes. Anti-aliasing methods also play a role, a non-AA font rendering method (eg Game UI) will most likely have the lowest legibility for italics.

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@Lee3735518

I often use strong for keywords and keyphrases after reading somewhere that indexing bots take "strong" and "em" tags into account (I have not been able to tell if it is indeed the case. But it prompted me to take emphasis into account).

I use the two elements for different levels of emphasis. I like to think the strong-taged words to be relevant if you were to summarize the content. whereas em-taged words would come into play for a different kind of emphasis.

I used em once for names in texts which at the same time were links to profile pages of these people. So I use em for another kind of emphasis. This use however, might make more sense if

<em level="1"></em>
<em level="2"></em>


actually existed.

This has nothing to do with grammar or proper use of the language. It even might be wrong :)
It's just my two cents on the matter. Hope this helps you anyway.

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@Nimeshi706

From a technical standpoint, you should use italics whenever writing titles of books or films. Things like that.

Italics are used for emphasis. When you want to draw attention to a word. Which is similar to bold, but italics doesn't seem to "jump out" as much. You should never italics a whole paragraph or other huge chunk of text. But you can use it as part of a layout. You could italicize your title, for instance.

Creatively, there's a lot of directions you could go in, in my opinion. But, don't overuse it either.

Here are some resources on topics for italics:
grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/italics.htm www.pws-ltd.com/sections/articles/2008/italics.html
All in all, it's a personal aesthetic decision. If it looks good, keep it. If it doesn't, kill it.

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