91 Opens huge doors for me as a creative web designer

As someone who despises being forced to be a box-stacker and “Arial, Verdana, sans-serif” fanatic, I love the possibilities of web-based font displaying becoming more universally-available.

Of course as a professional in the design world I will always prepare for the out of date and stubborn viewers. But this is like a light coming on in the very free and diverse world of web design.

And with regards to the worry that mom-and-pop people will use this poorly, it’s going to be such an industry-deep function, it’ll be off their radar.

I’ve tried it with some standard and some foofoo fonts, and the only major issue I can see is tweaking with the sizes to eliminate the harsh pixelization. “Point” size is far better than “pixel” size declarations for text. And anti-aliasing is not gonna happen for a long time. if ever.

But I will enjoy this and share it with my peers in the biz!

posted at 03:39 am on September 28, 2007 by Troy Vera

92 The good, and the bad

This sounds unbelievably helpful, and yet I can see where concerns could be founded; I myself am doing a redesign of a website (the original pages were created by the client) which had the exact problem mentioned in the article. The old page’s body text was Papyrus. Ouch. Not only ugly, but not everybody has it installed, causing the page text to default.

All the same, the pro’s outweigh the con’s. I would really like to see this implemented, and am willing to help!

posted at 05:31 am on September 28, 2007 by Jack Smith

93 6 of one and half dozen of another

As much as I’d like to play with fonts isn’t it quicker to design an image graphic – and it seems like you’d have more options as to how to arrange the text if designing an image. I guess it’s another arrow in the quiver for web design but when I really think about it – I’d probably just stick to making images.

posted at 05:57 pm on October 7, 2007 by Joseph Lundeen

94 I think this sounds great

True, some people will screw it up (I may be on that list once or twice, my page’s while never myspace-horrid, have been called “ugly” before). However, I agree that content will be just as important. One thing I have noticed though… When the content’s worth it… An ugly page will get better. Even mine improve over time, because I, and the very small number of people who frequent the page, want two things:

Good content: Already there in most of our opinions…

A easy and (in some cases) pleasing way to see that content:

I have a mind that says “Don’t make a web page you won’t use yourself”. I don’t know how well that goes over for people who make a living in web design, but as a amateur designer, I think its important. If its a blog, fan site, or creativity [removed]like a web comic or story writing or art gallery) site, why make it if you won’t go back to it yourself. True you’re going to be putting it together for others to see, but there are several reasons to go yourself.
If its a fan site, it should have reference information to what its dedicated to.
If its a blog, blogs are like journals, and few journal keepers I know NEVER go back and read.
If its a creativity expression site, at least at the beginning you’re showing it to your friends, and is a great alternate storage place as well. Its a great way simply to access the images/stories/comics/whatever when you aren’t near the originals. Any build-on-itself creativity can benefit from the creator having a simple access to previous material when on the road, or even at the coffee shop.

So why make a site you can’t stand to look at? However, I’m constantly by friend, acquaintance, and enemy described as having The Crazy but hey.

It makes sense to me. I’m by far on the geek and logic side of computer and web use, but even I feel the need for the occasional aesthetic. This is a simple way.

As for Joseph Lundeens bit:

I don’t see how it wouldn’t be quicker. Providing images means sitting at Photoshop or The Gimp and tweaking and tweaking, then using the image in the draft page design, and if it doesn’t fit or behave when you test other resolutions… you have to go back into your image manipulator and tweak some more. As a font, simple applications of the text become no harder than when using a basic font on the “general” list. Your tweaking is restrained to your favorite text editor, and a couple web browsers for preview.

Some applications of artistic text are different. They really have to be in places and styles related to an image, those should go in the image. However, If I can make my Header, and Headings stand out without cramming my web server full of images. I don’t want to.

I see this as making page loading faster, and another step towards “keeping the pretty screen without molesting the printer”. If your fancy text is an image, even putting it in the CSS as a background image for a div means that TEXT isn’t there when you build a simple image less print format css, or you’re slamming people who print section of your pages with images that take lots of ink, and on a black and white or low dpi printer maybe unreadable anyway.

posted at 11:56 pm on October 10, 2007 by Noble Hays

95 Lets Go!

I noticed the main argument was aesthetics. This is the first thing I thought about when the idea of web fonts first found my interest. I thought about it a bit differently though. I thought about all those individuals out there with Frontpage who wanted a website and used a combination of primary colors and animated clip-art to make it happen. But instead of thinking of this as a bad thing I thought, as a designer, it would create a higher demand for good design. With all these schmoes out there using Papyrus for their body copy well designed sites would be a high commodity. I can hardly wait for web fonts. Especially for those people that pay for bandwidth on a per kilobyte basis. This would save people in the UK using their mobile phone for surfing a whole lot of money while enabling them to see your beautiful site.

posted at 10:40 pm on October 11, 2007 by Steven Walker

96 Adding bad design adds good design

If you increase the design tools available, you increase the number of bad designs available for people to try, yes. But you also increase the number of good designs people can create as well. And individual bad designs don’t survive, even if bad design in general does. Individual good designs, on the other hand, continue on. So who cares how many corporate websites could end up out there? If someone makes a bad design, do what people have done throughout history and vote with your eyes (or wallow in kitsch, if appropriate).

In a way it doesn’t matter whether or not the web ‘needs’ more typefaces – we’re going to get them (eventually). More and more people read on the web – eventually the web will be the primary place in which contemporary postmodern society gains its information. Are we going to express the bulk of human experience through a few typefaces? Are we going to expect people to limit themselves in this one aspect of web design while widening field in other directions? And how the heck would type foundries continue to make money if print designers (who buy typefaces from time to time) are replaced by web designers (who don’t)? This is an eventually-inevitable change, no doubt of it.

The trick is that someone has to find a way through the copyright law jungle. Most likely some forward-thinking type foundry in combination with a type-friendly software company. But someone’s got to put the legal pressure on – hopefully that’s what Apple’s up to by adding @font-family to Safari through Web Kit . . ..

posted at 11:19 pm on October 11, 2007 by Richard Baldwin

97 how to put background music or simple music player

I am not able to put music on this site I am working on. I have never done it before. I have followed all the instructions. The player shows up, but the file cannot be found? I do not know what to do and need help. Please advise.

posted at 07:16 pm on October 12, 2007 by stephen mule

98 Why the blockade on fonts?

I appreciate that fonts are protected by copyright law, but so are images and music, yet they’ve managed to make their way through the web to users.

The only reason I can see why imported fonts aren’t supported is, unlike images and music, the only people who know enough to explicitly want non-standard fonts (designers) don’t represent enough of a voice to make the feature hit the browser development road map.

That, or the font manufacturers are just that god-like powerful. :\

posted at 10:30 pm on October 26, 2007 by E K

99 TrueType web fonts with True Font Family

Actually, there is another alternative now. You can use True Font Family to render images through 100% CSS. It works on all major browsers (IE/Firefox/Opera/Safari) and when TrueType fonts are finally available you do not need to make any adjustments to your stylesheets.

I have taken the liberty to add True Font Family to these examples. You can check them out online over at:

http://www.truefontfamily.com/?p=alistapart

No modifications have been made other than adding the required JavaScript. And the imported stylesheet with the @font-face rules had to be moved to the same domain in order to allow JavaScript to read it.

posted at 05:56 pm on November 1, 2007 by Remon Lammers

100 Untitled

SIFR is indeed a good way of using your favourite fonts on a web page. However, I feel that it is only a stop gap until the real problem of using fonts online is rectified. Have you ever tried copy and pasting a mixture of normal and sifr text from a page? As far as I can tell, it can’t be done.

I think there is high probability that opening up web fonts will be abused, but that’s why people like us have a job, to ensure that it doesn’t. Personally I can’t wait for a proper solution to this problem.

posted at 03:40 pm on January 15, 2008 by Chris Rowe