All of this talk about new browsers has sparked a new interest for me as I have been doing webdesign for quite some time. In some of the latest AIGA meetings there has been a lot of talking of embeddings fonts into your website so it is true text. This will keep you from having to make pesky images anytime you want that "Starcraft" font and etc.
There are obviously huge licensing issues with this and a lot of font's have not got on board. There are multiple sites with paid packs that you can buy of fonts that will work. There are also multiple free fonts or already made fonts that will now work on your website if you code it into your site.
It is actually as simple as just a line of code. ((So even if your some dreamweaver scrub don't be afraid to take a look into doing this))
I really think this is a large leap in the future of websites and I haven't seen anything on TL addressing this kind of new technology.
Check out some of these things and let me know if you think it will catch on. I am quite the typophile myself. So this is very exciting.
Here is Typekit which sells packs of fonts but has really good information on how getting the fonts on your site works.
As this is getting bigger everyday I hope to see it expand to more sites and hopefully web designers can help spread the word. This is not being used nearly as much as it should be, and from what I have seen and asked friends at different universities they have not been taught how to do this.
So, what do you guys think? I am sure many people don't care, but for those of you that do, feel free to discuss!
I'm trying to figure out why this is a good thing. I have no interest in seeing what crappy fonts that some website thinks look good. It's bad enough to have people using CSS, JavaScript, and Flash to make websites look horrible. Now, they can use straight HTML and render their sites completely unreadable.
That's not to say that embedded fonts are a terrible idea that cannot be used wisely. But the web is not something that should be used to provide perfect WYSIWIG.
Ever heard of Google WebFonts? They put a lot of fonts in google servers so you can use those fonts even if people don't have it in their browsers or if you don't wanna upload it into your own server. Just use the ones google put their. They even teach you how to use them.
Well... Think not so much of the crappy typefaces as to cleaner ones like Trajan, Helvetica, Myriad, Minion, etc...
I don't think that this really has too much to do with a WYSIWIG editor or anything. I do agree that this could wreak havoc on bad pages.. It should be forced to have less experienced web masters use some kind of CMS on their sites to keep organization.
There is much difference between organizational layout that looks bad with CSS, HTML, JS and Flash versus the actual content and typefaces on the website itself.
@GoogleWebFonts People Thanks for linking me.. I actually forgot they did this. Last time I checked the selection was VERY poor.. I will research it some more though, hopefully they expanded the library.
On May 27 2011 04:34 Noxie wrote: @GoogleWebFonts People Thanks for linking me.. I actually forgot they did this. Last time I checked the selection was VERY poor.. I will research it some more though, hopefully they expanded the library.
They just announced they expanded it in that video I linked. Which is like 2 weeks old or something. You really should check out the video, it's really cool what they show that you can do with just CSS
We have been discussing making this usable to all users on TL, it makes it a lot easier to do pretty live report topics and generally format posts. Its pretty cool stuff, don't have to mess with photoshop to make nice headers.
That would be awesome.. It would really make posts like LR threads and announcment threads POP. I am not sure how that would be implemented though. Some CSS plugin?
On May 27 2011 05:42 Noxie wrote: That would be awesome.. It would really make posts like LR threads and announcment threads POP. I am not sure how that would be implemented though. Some CSS plugin?
On May 27 2011 04:46 heyoka wrote: We have been discussing making this usable to all users on TL, it makes it a lot easier to do pretty live report topics and generally format posts. Its pretty cool stuff, don't have to mess with photoshop to make nice headers.
Photoshop? The best headers are made with MS Paint.
fontsquirrel is another good resource for free fonts.
It's already caught on and is commonly used on many sites now. The only real problem is licensing popular fonts as they're so expensive and many have differing rules. Some allow unlimited use, some only allow use on x amount of sites per x amount of dollars you pay them, but like I mentioned before, fontsquirrel has a ton of great fonts that are web friendly.
On May 27 2011 04:46 heyoka wrote: We have been discussing making this usable to all users on TL, it makes it a lot easier to do pretty live report topics and generally format posts. Its pretty cool stuff, don't have to mess with photoshop to make nice headers.
I think the concept is awesome. Of course, it can and will be abused just as anything is abused. I mean this more in 'creating god awful designs' than anything else. But there will be excellent designers that incorporate custom fonts in beautiful ways.
This technology has been around for awhile now and the main issue behind it is copyright of expensive fonts. If I like what I see and I know it costs money, it takes the click of a button to save the code generated(js based fonts) and/or the directory in which you stored your fonts. On top of that, this is a CSS3 based attribute and if you know about web development a lot of older browsers don't support this.
This is a great step forward, but looking at the current percentages, web developers will always need to take two steps back to support people who don't have the most up-to-date browsers to render the latest iterations of html5/css3/jquery etc.
On May 27 2011 06:58 dopesauce wrote: This technology has been around for awhile now and the main issue behind it is copyright of expensive fonts. If I like what I see and I know it costs money, it takes the click of a button to save the code generated(js based fonts) and/or the directory in which you stored your fonts. On top of that, this is a CSS3 based attribute and if you know about web development a lot of older browsers don't support this.
This is a great step forward, but looking at the current percentages, web developers will always need to take two steps back to support people who don't have the most up-to-date browsers to render the latest iterations of html5/css3/jquery etc.
That's why there are font repositories like google web fonts and the proposed TL one that heyoka is talking about. These can be used for free by anyone and will work on any modern browser.