Topics: Design: Web Fonts

There’s life after Georgia and Verdana. Using standard CSS @font-face to embed licensed fonts on your website. How it works. Licensing concerns. Browser concerns. Platform issues. Standardization. Font formats. Intellectual property and licensing. Typekit and other solutions. Versus Flash. Versus sIFR. Versus Cufon. Web standards and typography. (7 articles)

Say No to Faux Bold

by Alan Stearns

Issue 350May 8, 2012

Browsers can do terrible things to type. If text is styled as bold or italic and the typeface family does not include a bold or italic font, browsers will compensate by trying to create bold and italic styles themselves. The results are an awkward mimicry of real type design, and can be especially atrocious with web fonts. Adobe’s Alan Stearns shares quick tips and techniques to ensure that your @font-face rules match the weight and styles of the fonts, and that you have a @font-face rule for every style your content uses. If you’re taking the time to choose a beautiful web font for your site, you owe it to yourself and your users to make certain you’re actually using the web font — and only the web font — to display your site’s content in all its glory.

CSS3 Bling in the Real World

by Chris Mills

Issue 331July 26, 2011

It’s here, it’s queer, get used to it! CSS3 is fun and fabulous, and if we design with progressive enhancement in mind, we can add all kinds of CSS wizardry to our websites and applications without worrying about how things work (or don’t) in old browsers and outdated devices. But what happens if our audience includes folks who use non-Webkit-powered phones? And what if our clients still believe a web page is supposed to look and work the same in every device? Learn to make CSS3 yumminess as cross-browser as possible.

More Meaningful Typography

by Tim Brown

Issue 327May 3, 2011

Designing with modular scales is one way to make more conscious, meaningful choices about measurement on the web. Modular scales work with—not against—responsive design and grids, provide a sensible alternative to basing our compositions on viewport limitations du jour, and help us achieve a visual harmony not found in compositions that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers. Tim Brown shows us how.

Web Fonts at the Crossing

by Richard Fink

Issue 307June 8, 2010

Everything you wanted to know about web fonts but were afraid to ask. Richard Fink summarizes the latest news in web fonts, examining formats, rules, licenses, and tools. He creates a checklist for evaluating font hosting and obfuscation services like Typekit; looks at what’s coming down the road (from problems of advanced typography being pursued by the CSS3 Fonts Module group, to the implications of Google-hosted fonts); and wraps it all up with a how-to on making web fonts work today.

On Web Typography

by Jason Santa Maria

Issue 296November 17, 2009

Until now, chances are that if we dropped text onto a web page in a system font at a reasonable size, it was legible. But with many typefaces about to be freed for use on websites, choosing the right ones to complement a site's design will be far more challenging. Many faces to which we’ll soon have access were never meant for screen use, either because they’re aesthetically unsuitable or because they’re just plain illegible. Jason Santa Maria, a force behind improved type on the web, presents qualities and methods to keep in mind as we venture into the widening world of web type.

Real Web Type in Real Web Context

by Tim Brown

Issue 296November 17, 2009

Web fonts are here. Now that browsers support real fonts in web pages and we can license complete typefaces for such use, it's time to think pragmatically about how to use real fonts in our web projects. Above all, we need to know how our type renders in screens, in web browsers. To that end, Tim Brown has created Web Font Specimen, a handy, free resource web designers and type designers can use to see how typefaces will look on the web.

CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing

by Håkon Wium Lie

Issue 244August 28, 2007

Ten years ago, Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos gave us typographic control over web pages via CSS. But Verdana and Georgia take us only so far. Now Håkon shows us how to take web design out of the typographic ghetto, by harnessing the power of real TrueType fonts.

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