Cool Design Articles

One of the biggest misses on the web today (say web 2.5, someone says we are in a transition) from a design point of view, is for sure the inability to use whatever font easily on a website.

The history
CSS has a property called “font-family“. This property allows you to use any font of your choice for your website (and is compatible with all major browsers). In theory. The problem with the font-family property is the licensing of the font you want to use. Why? With “font-family” the used font needs to be on a server and get downloaded to the browser. This is some sort of “not allowed font distribution” and most foundries/vendors/creators of fonts, including FontFont (need separate licensing), Hoefler & Frere-Jones (need separate licensing), ITC (need separate licensing), Linotype (need extended licensing) do not allow that.

The preferred method today
Now, some people my say now, that there is a solution all web designer (should) know called sIFR (by Mike Davidson) the “scalable” method deriving from IFR (Inman Flash Replacement). And that is right. But is it easy to use and install? Not really. sIFR or IFR is based on Adobe Flash’s ability to embed Fonts in a Flash Document. Whoever used it (or is using it) knows, that it takes a fair amount of time to install - creating the flash document with the embedded font, loading the javascript, creating the stylesheet. This might be a reason why IFR and sIFR have certain success as known best method to replace fonts, but are not spread and used that much even today. Just open a couple of websites (not just designer ones - from different branches of life) to get the confirmation: The majority of website does still replace fonts by the old way: Image replacement.

The old method used today
The old good Image replacement technique(s) are still used a lot, however, they more negative then good features. The most indiseriable is the update of an headline (or text) replaced by an image. Beside that most techniques fail in terms of accessibilty - basically the website with no css, with no images or both.

Cufon - the final answer?
I found this service called Cufon. It striked me because of it’s simplicity. It is very easy to handle and to integrate, in fact, all you need is to create the javascript trough the generator form and load the cufon javascript library to get started. This is a LOT easier then sIFR and IFR. However, Cufon is not the solution of all problems. The licensing problems still remain but in a minor way. Cufon converts fonts to an SVG Font format and then to VML paths (for IE). Basically the original font is converted in something you can’t use on your computer for something else. So, we could potentially use every font with this method with the apropriate licensing for the web. I join Cameron Moll’s opinion to Cufon:

[...]Therefore, I personally see Cufón as an good interim step between sIFR and @font-face.

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