Celebrate or Panic?

Way back in the day, if you wanted to have some other font face gracing your pages, something other than Arial, Verdana, Comic, Times, Georgia etc etc, then you had to use a graphic.  There were a set number of “web safe” fonts available and all html websites had to abide by it.  Unlike the “web safe” colours of old that were largely ignored as graphics cards began to show millions of colours, fonts were still limited to what everyone was guaranteed to have in their system.  Surprisingly, this is still the same now as it was 10 years ago.

The down side of this for many clients, was that for SEO purposes, you really could only use an image for a heading, not for a large portion of text.  The good news for the designers is they had an opt out when someone wanted a large unreadable script style font face for half of the page.

Lucida Handwriting.  For some reason, people are always drawn to this font to emulate handwriting and thus attribute an air of “personal” to a website.  Unfortunately, it has been used so often now, that apart from being practically unreadable in large amounts, it is now the most impersonal of fonts.  This is not an image, you can copy and paste this and Google can read it.

So celebrate or panic, but that seems to be coming to an end with CSS3 and the latest browsers.  Without any need of a script conversion running or a flash program pretending to replace the text, you can now apply whatever font you wish on a webpage, subject to copyrights, subject (hopefully) to taste and all without slowing down the page.

This is a boon for the many people using Wordpress.  Even with image replacement for header tags, one was unable to use this on a page generated by a database.  Then of course there is the ability to change an entire sites headers.  If the headers are in pure css, no problem, if the headers were in a funky font that had been made into a JPG, well in some websites, it would have been cheaper to have a new site then change the color of that many title JPG’s.

TW Font.  A nice albeit small replacement for many of the sans serif fonts.  It’s not Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, but it kinda looks like it.  Again, this is not an image, you can copy and paste this and Google can read it.

We at 2dragons haven’t decided if we think this is a great idea or not.  Randas is digging through her font collection, when she sees a font she likes, it makes her happy.  When she sees a font that she is terrified someone will ask us to incorporate into a design, she runs screaming from the room.

It’s very loud in here these days.  For the sake of my eardrums, choose your fonts wisely.

The F Word

Font choices are a critical part of web design. Any graphic designer worth her salt should have a library of carefully hand-picked fonts at her disposal at any time. It’s not enough to have them, she should know how and why each of them works.

Newcomers to the wonderful world of font tend to get understandably excited about it. They want to use all the fonts at once. They go bonkers for Broadway crazy for Comic Sans and giddy for Giddyup Std

Some people can get attached to a certain font, going back to it again and again for the simple reason that they love it. Font-monogamy is fine for your personal work, but for public displays of font it’s best to carefully consider your options. How do you want to be perceived? What are you trying to communicate? Which font suits you best?

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Favourite Icons

I had a couple of people ask me recently, how do you get the little image next to your site name when you add it to favourites, or when it’s in the browser?

Suprisingly simple, its called a fav icon it sits in your root directory with the name favicon.ico.

Well thats all well and dandy I hear you ask, but how does it get there!

You’re expecting a sales pitch next now aren’t you?

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