11 Untitled

Some thoughts:
I think it is far more important to write a good text with decent structure than it is to have a good design, first class fonts etc… (expl. myspace is ugly, still many people visit it => content is king).

Not many people can make a living of font design so I think that, unless they can protect all the work they put in to it, they are not gonna be interested. (Making a decent font takes skill and many months of hard work.)

Forcing designers to make a good structure/ valid html / less forgiving browsers is more important IMO.(makes less need for stuff like quirksmode’s front-end gilde.=> webdesign is stuff for pro’s just as gardening, printing,…) Apple made it possible for everyone to be a designer, see how for it has gotten us.

If we need to support custom type then let it be; – open type (One file for Mac and Pc,regular, bold, small caps,…) – something we can compress with gzip. 100kb for a custom font is to much. – it has to have all the good stuff printed type has: kerning, ligatures,… – webreading and printing the page with this font should be possible (sans for online reading).

http://canvaspaint.org/blog/2006/12/rendering-text/ noticed similar problems with text and the canvas tag.

posted at 09:30 am on August 28, 2007 by yves peeters

12 Custom fonts a problem?

By the way, there already are very popular alternatives to HTML now that allow designers to use whatever fonts they fancy. One is to use an image in place of text. The other is to use Flash, either for the graphics themselves or to do the entire site in Flash.

Both approaches have serious usability problems unless some very well-informed care is taken. No matter how bad CSS-based font decisions may be, they’ll always be better than images or Flash. Convincing these same poor designers to use real fonts in CSS would greatly improve things.

For one, you’d actually be able to shut the fonts off. In the vast majority of sites, the results would still be readable.

posted at 09:59 am on August 28, 2007 by Richard Connamacher

13 Untitled

First of all, the examples didn’t render properly… or at all. I tried it on both IE7 and Firefox 2.0.0.8. Am I supposed to install soemthing??? If so, what’s the essence?

Also, I really agree. I’m working on my website at the moment, and I honestly get IRRITATED when the best looking font I can use is Trebuchet Ms. I’m not a fan of the ordinary, and I think we should push aside all these excuses and figure out a way to embed these things already.

posted at 11:25 am on August 28, 2007 by Onyeka Aghanenu

14 Don't underestimate typography

Thanks for the article. In response to some of the comments: Yes “The web is not print”, but it shares a heck of a lot in terms of the visual design sensibilities. Giving responsible designers more room for manoeuvre can only be a good thing. True, we don’t need a massive amount of fonts to produce beautiful sites, but never underestimate the power of typography. I think Oliver Reichenstein’s post at Information Architects (http://www.informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period) gives a good background to that discussion.

posted at 12:00 pm on August 28, 2007 by Nick Smith

15 Untitled

@Dragan, Adam:

Web designers are concerned about fonts because text is the most important thing on most web pages (just look at this page!).

I don’t see the point of “don’t give them another toy, they only will produce crap with it”: You could ban CSS completely for the same reason. Actually, I don’t understand why web fonts have not been implemented for ages as there is surely a big desire for such a feature. By every text image it spares it makes the web a better place. (the same goes for text shades, by the way)

And if you don’t like it, turn it off by using your own CSS – I can’t understand why so many people bother with bad web design if they can change it so easily.

posted at 12:35 pm on August 28, 2007 by Herbert Braun

16 Looking forward to it

A standardised way to specify web-fonts would be fantastic.

No, I wouldn’t expect authors to specify unusual fonts for body text, but for headings and subheadings it would be great. At the moment, the options are:

• use a standard font (boring)
• use images (takes a long time, accessibility problems)

• use Flash (no idea where to start with this one but I guess it takes a long time, certainly has major accessibility problems).

With CSS to specify web-fonts, all those problems go away. Decent web browsers allow users to easily turn off page styles, so if an author does come up with a horrendous design, with one click it can be replaced by an unstyled but legible and usable page – more easily than if they’ve used images or Flash to display their choice of font.

And as Nick Smith says, “don’t underestimate typography”. The use of distinctive and appropriate fonts can really boost a web page, and make it far more attractive and professional-looking than one that uses the exact same fonts that everyone has on their computers already.

posted at 12:41 pm on August 28, 2007 by Stephen Down

18 First of all, happy birthday css.

Second, Great writeup.

I was under the impression that the example web pages would render the fonts identically to the images displayed in the article, but I guess I misread.

I can’t wait until this actually works, seems like it will be a great resource for those who can use it properly.

posted at 01:31 pm on August 28, 2007 by Will Holman

19 Text and other design issues

@Herbert, #15:

I won’t say that text is not the most important thing on the web. And i am looking at this page, it is well designed reads pleasant. This is mostly due to the fact that it uses screen-optimized fonts. There are very few of them that would render well, contain at least most useful unicode characters and have versions in bold, italic and bold-italic. 90% of available fonts that fulfill these criteria are already installed on every computer.

I don’t know about the Steffman fonts, but the ones from Larabie, like most “free fonts”, as funny as they are, contain ultra-few to none at all characters outside of the ascii range. So they are only useful in a very controlled environment, like a printed page. Or how should people for example write comments on weblogs in such a font when they are not even able to type in their own language?

Is there some idea that the possibility to “embed” fonts would create a new market for low-resolution fonts? Who would finance the production of such a font, a very labor-intensive project that is essentially about giving away the product? Maybe font-DRM should be built into every browser so that web fonts cannot be used on unlicensed URLs?

But closer on the subject, the desire to have more fonts: I am not against new toys for designers and they can produce as much great things or crap with them as they want. And i love when amateurs have these tools as well and make more “unreadable myspace profiles”. But the craving for new and more fonts is so old and boring, it reminds me of the 90s when the DTP crowd moved over to the web and put JPEGs with their favorite fonts online. Now at least they are concerned about “accessibility”, but deep down below they feel that fonts is still the way to go. They still do not love the web. (If at least there would be an article with a suggestion on how to extend CSS to produce glitter graphics in a standardized way!)

As for the argument that i can turn off what i do not like: First of all, most users don’t know how to do such a thing, secondly it takes the last gram of seriousness from the design discipline. If design would only about “liking” or “not liking”, essentially about taste, then why should we talk about it in general? Many designers surround themselves with the air of science and the art of engineering, are reading and writing theoretical essays and join public discussions. But when faced with criticism, many redraw to “it’s in the end just a matter of taste” or “just turn it off”. So i think this one didn’t count. :)

What counts is that the provided screenshots in this article display badly rendered characters (in terribly justified columns) in a text that exists just to demonstrate the idea that there is a need for more fonts. I am not convinced.

I would like to know with what font exactly that is available now the body text of a web page would look better? And why should i help advocating such an outdated dream when there are much worse problems in contemporary browsers?

posted at 01:49 pm on August 28, 2007 by Dragan Espenschied

20 Article

“Perhaps we should push browsers to adopt SVG Fonts, whch would be a great solution for this since SVG fonts should be referenceable from HTML CSS as well. Both Gecko and WebKit have bugs open for that, though Gecko’s SVG engineers have said they’re not going to add font support until at least late 2008.” I agree on this with Richard. MySpace pages can now be made even more illegible! Teens the world over will rejoice!

posted at 02:33 pm on August 28, 2007 by Tom Green

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