Who you callin' a Font-face?

When I set up a comp for a website in Photoshop, many times I can spend hours figuring out which pixel goes where and what color it is. And since I drank the web standards/semantic web Kool-Aid, I’ve tried to keep the “text as image” scenario to an absolute minimum. So, while I’m in Photoshop lining everything up, I always seem to end up creating the big content box of greek text. What font should I use for the body copy? It usually ends up being Arial or Times New Roman. As web designers, we’re able to select our 3 or so favorite fonts for a certain class and hope for the best. My favorite thing is the “serif or sans-serif” declaration, which to me seems like a shot in the dark since people can change this preference in their browser. Essentially, outside of Arial and Times New Roman web typography has been just that—a crap shoot.

Not ever person realizes that websites are designed and built by people who are not necessarily designers (or builders for that matter). So, this is sort of a good thing to constrain font usage on the web. Having a limited amount of fonts to choose from creates a usability construct in that people on the internet get used to seeing Arial or Times New Roman, so anything outside of that throws them for a loop.

A colleague of mine once cringed at the possibility of selecting body copy fonts for a client as it would add another layer of complication in producing a site. I can understand this, though it strikes me as a bit lazy for a designer to disregard something as vital as the typeface of the majority of the content. It’s hard to imagine a book designer only being offered 2 fonts for the body text, isn’t it?

Enter the font-face descriptor from 1997 —that really worked out great, ugh. I can’t remember which browser supported this or didn’t, but I do know that it didn’t gain any traction at all and we all kept seeing the same ol’ fonts.

Twelve years later, I think the fire under people’s collective asses are being lit as Safari and Firefox have embraced “new” ideas in web design, including embedding fonts in websites. Of course, this means designers will end up waiting a few years for Microsoft’s IE to catch up, then another few more years for grandma’s to update their web browser—but hey, I’m not complaining.

There are a few potentially large repercussions to all this font-face business. We could potentially have to interact with ugly fonts and/or font treatments. Also, I’m no performance analyst but I wonder how embedding a font or twelve million will slow down me hitting a website.

One of the interesting areas though is licensing typefaces. Right now, designers are limited in the legal sense to free fonts. The idea of “you get what you pay for” typically applies. When I think of free fonts out there on the internet, I always think of the ACDC or Purple Rain fonts which are purely decorative. I’m unaware of any free web fonts out there that are readable in terms of using it for body copy.

In my mind, this opens up the possibilities on two fronts. The first being foundries being able to license fonts for specific usage online, hence increasing their revenue. The other possibility is for type designers to tackle readability issues regarding web typography. So, we might be seeing some really interesting new fonts in webpages! At the very least, this whole font-face thing might stir up the typographer/webdesigner debates in after-work cocktail parties.

By the way, this is set in CA BND by Cape Arcona. While it’s really nice headline font, I wouldn’t want to read someone’s blog using this face.

date Posted on Friday, 08 May 2009
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