Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Web fonts talk online
The text and the slides for the talk I gave last night at London Web Standards are online.
In the talk I gave suggestions about how to get started with web fonts which are still a bit of a mess. I’ve also cited a lot of very helpful information on the net so you can get much more detail on the topics I covered. I’ve also stuck the html, css and js test files I used on there. Comments and corrections most welcome.
Labels: cufón, londonwebstandards, standards, talks, typeface.js, w3c, web fonts
Comments (2)
Been reading the stuff of your talk on web fonts.
At this point, I think talk of web designers concerning themselves at all with the multitude of weights - and even styles - that ordinarily comprise a font-family meant for print, is inappropriate to today's low-res display environment.
All it does is confuse.
To me, the obvious place to start using web fonts is where Other text-replacement techniques like sIFR are now commonly used - headings. Text sizes in the range of 18px-36px give or take.
Further, your contention that retail fonts offer better "quality" is preposterous.
What qualities might those be?
The example you give of the NYTimes "Skimmer" is living proof. These are retail fonts being hosted by Typekit (Cheltenham and Franklin) and, until they get up into the 36px range, they look like crap. I'm amazed they're going with it.
Is it too much trouble for the NYTimes to fork over the bucks to touch up the hinting?
This blog, as displayed in Firefox is also living proof. Puritan looks fine in a heading. As body text it's brutal.
Even still, thanks for giving a damn about getting web fonts to work and remember that getting it wrong is a part of getting it right.
And I did learn some things and got some ideas from your presentation.
Regards,
Rich
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Multiple weights: why shouldn’t web designers try to get their heads around type families with many members? The right typeface is the right typeface however light or heavy. For effective contrast you use weights that are separated by one member, so light goes with bold. Only screen fonts have ‘bold’ weights that are effectively the heavy or black; normal typefaces have much subtler variation between the regular and the bold.
Hinting: perhaps I have a blind spot here. To me, on my Mac or on a Linux VM, many if not all typefaces look great at text sizes. The Franklin Gothic byline you mention is taking things a little far [though again it looks just great to me], but I assume that the NYT’s editor has tried it on a Blackberry and thinks it looks great. Otherwise it wouldn’t fly, surely?
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