Nov 28 2008
Typography
The other day I read a great tongue-in-cheek post on font choices over at Top Ten Blog Tips and it got me thinking. As a web designer, I don’t even think twice about the fact that I have approximately 10 fonts to choose from for my sites. This is just a fact I accept. Which is odd, when you think about it. With all of the advancements and enhancements to the internet and design since the 90s, why are we still stuck with the same old fonts?
CSS is over 10 years old, and back in 1998 CSS2 described a way to link to fonts from style sheets. The problem at the time, however, was that neither Microsoft nor Netscape chose to use the accepted TrueType format. Instead, they each picked their own format and the idea of using web fonts died.
That’s not to say there aren’t ways to change the fonts in your design. You can carefully select a font and go to the trouble of ensuring it is pixel-perfect then rendering it as a background. Or you can embed your font, to be downloaded by the reader’s browser. Or you can use a third party tool to convert your fonts to SWF or to some other web technology. There are problems with these solutions, (printing, load times, browsers, etc.) which is what keeps most designers from using them.
There are, however, ways you can spice up your fonts and your limited font choices.
