background preloader

Review of Popular Web Font Embedding Services - Smashing Magazine

Advertisement In the mid-80s the desktop publishing revolution began with the introduction of the Mac Plus, Aldus PageMaker and the Apple LaserWriter printer. It took quite a few years for these tools to make an impact on the design and publishing world, but once they did, there was no looking back. In 2010 we see a similar revolution starting to take shape with web fonts. Even though @font-face was introduced in the CSS2 spec in 1998, it wasn’t until this past year that all in-use web browsers added support for it. Web font services, like Typekit and now the Google Font API, have captured a lot of attention. While all of these services are unique, they each provide a tool for web designers and developers to legally display professional fonts on their website. Typekit Typekit, Inc. is a popular web font service from Small Batch Inc and founder Jeffrey Veen. Advantages Over Other Services Strong platform integrations. Pricing Free trial account includes the use of 2 fonts on 1 website.

Fantastic Typography Blogs For Your Inspiration - Smashing Magazine Advertisement Some say that web design without typography is like an orange without its peel, it just isn’t complete. Typography encompasses the reality of effective web design and achieves success in creating web page identity, eye-catching sites, and the enhancement of visual appearance. Typography is much more than the “art of text”, it’s the evolution of creativity within simple to intricate web designs. One can say that a good architecture needs great support, the same concept can be applied to web design in the sense that a good blog could do without the use of typography, but an astounding one could use the creative support. Typography leaves you with the option of bringing together simple creativity with unique and effective communication in order to get your blog or sites main focus across. You may want to take a look at the following related posts: Stunning Typography Blogs Typography Served A growing gallery of fresh typographic works from leading creative professionals.

Web Font Performance: Weighing @font-face Options and Alternatives Web fonts are a key ingredient in today's website designs; at my employer (AOL) it is a given redesigns will feature downloadable fonts. The days of maintaining a sprite full of graphic text headlines are behind us. We’ve moved on—but what approach yields the best performance? The goal of this article is to look at the various web font implementation options available, benchmark their performance, and arm you with some useful tips in squeezing the most bang for your font byte. I will even throw in a new font loader as a special bonus! Font Hosting Services vs. There are two approaches you can take to get licensed, downloadable fonts on to your web pages: font hosting services and do-it-yourself (DIY). Font Hosting Services like Typekit, Fonts.com, Fontdeck, etc., provide an easy interface for designers to manage fonts purchased, and generate a link to a dynamic CSS or JavaScript file that serves up the font. What the FOUT? Here are my recommendations for avoiding the FOUT: Firefox Chrome

Typefaces & Fonts: How to Choose and Combine Them Successfully Ready to get your marketing pieces set up? The first place to start is your fonts, because your font choice tells a lot about your business and what it stands for. Marketing guru Seth Godin talks about it here. Before you decide what you want the font to say, let’s review the two main font categories. Serif Fonts: Classic, Timeless, Easy to Read Serif fonts have little “feet” at the bottoms of the letters. Serif fonts are good for long blocks of text, too, which is why most books and magazines are set in them. Sans Serif Fonts: Streamlined, Modern, Contemporary Sans means “without,” so sans serif fonts are “without” the little feet that serif fonts have. Sans serif fonts are streamlined, modern and contemporary and make your business look cutting-edge and modern. To make your job easier, I recommend you use no more than two fonts. For maximum versatility, pick a serif and a sans serif font that work well together. Use Your “AGE” See the font sample above? In Search of Typography Resources

Performance Comparison: Typekit vs. Cloud.typography Published via typography.com On optimizely.com, we just switched our typeface from Proxima Nova (via Typekit), to Gotham (via Hoefler & Frere-Jones Cloud.typography). We’ve used Gotham in Photoshop mocks for a long time now, but recently decided to make the switch on our site mostly because it just looks better. We’ve long known that Typekit can be a bottleneck to our page load, so I took this opportunity to compare the performance impact of each service. Note: These are just some quick comparisons of the speeds based on my machine using optimizely.com. Typekit To use Typekit, you must insert JS in the head of your page, like so: <script type=“text/javascript” src=“//use.typekit.net/abc1def.js”></script><script type=“text/javascript”>try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script> It’s well known that script tags in the <head> of the document block page rendering. This script determines which fonts to serve to the user based on their OS and browser. Cloud.typography Takeaways Conclusion

Choosing Type Combinations Layers Magazine | Layers Magazine One of the most challenging—but also one of the most satisfying—aspects of designing with type is choosing several typefaces that “look great together.” But who’s to say what looks great together? Often you choose several faces and after experimenting for a while, you instinctively know that a particular combination “works.” But since we’re all so busy and under such deadlines, we need to find type solutions quickly. To do that, it helps tremendously to be able to put into words exactly why a particular combination doesn’t work and what to look for when trying to find faces that complement each other. First, follow the Holy Font Guideline #1 when choosing different typefaces for a piece: Concord or contrast, but don’t conflict. That is, either stick with different styles in the same typeface family (concord), or choose completely different faces (contrast). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. CONCORD For a concordant look, choose one type family from any category. CONFLICT OR CONTRAST? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Web Font Performance Which Method Reigns Supreme On The Web | Articles As a designer-turned-developer, I have found that one of the most glorious developments in the aesthetic of the web over the past few years is a more accessible variety in type. With @font-face towards the front-end of the introduction of CSS3, to Google Fonts and Typekit now being offered, there are finally a few different avenues to spice up your type. For the past few years, I've been using @font-face pretty much exclusively. If I had the .oft or .ttf version (and use was in accordance with the font licensing), I could create my web fonts and drop in my CSS - easy and free. There is also fontsquirrel.com -- providing a plethora of great fonts appropriately licensed and ready to go. I had read early on about download speeds and performance issues, but had never really seen any performance issues in the sites I had developed that warranted worrying about @font-face. Let the testing begin In the name of science, my tests were carried out with all thought on consistency. Typekit: Google Fonts:

70 Typographic, Clean And Minimalist Color Scheme Web Designs Hello there! It’s time for little inspiration and this time I wanted to showcase something different. You may know that very popular designer slogan – “More is Less”, and yes it’s often so true – unexperienced people tend to overcrowd, use too much colors in their designs. I just love these designs – they are very light, clean and usually uses only monochrome color scheme and just one or two bright colors for links or headers. You may also notice for such designs it’s more about grid, harmonic distribution through whole page and very silent, elegant accents. 1. One of the best clean, light and elegant websites I came across in this research. 2. 3. 4. 5. Very clean, yet professional web design. 6 .Made By On 7. Hot Meteor specializes in web, print, and branding. 8. Excellent accents leading your eye through whole page in the way author wants it. 10. 11. Visit his homepage – starting from index page you’ll get amazed how effectively Vitor Lourenco uses white space. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Typekit vs. Google Fonts | Trendecide I think it’s been over five years since I blogged my last battle, ColdFusion vs. PHP. Hopefully this post will be met with much less criticism. It’s hard to be a developer and not be unaware of Typekit or Google Web Fonts. Both services provide excellent alternatives to the standard fonts available and both services are now supported across all current browsers. For those of us who attempted to build our own fonts for using @font-face on our own projects, these services are a dream come true as the process what tedious, cumbersome and didn’t always process the desired result. First, lets do a quick comparison: Google‘s interface is simple and very easy to use. Typekit‘s interface is beautiful, intuitive and simple to use. Despite the fact both services are nothing short of awesome, in the end my favorite is Typekit which I turn to for most of my web font needs, particularly for personal and small business sites.

40 Examples of Beautiful Typography in Web Design Typography is certainly a very important aspect of web design. So choosing the proper typography for your site is for sure a huge step of the design process. You can have a simple and delicate typo, a huge and strong one, you can also go colorful and crazy or light and smooth. Amazee Labs Fixel Carsonified Tokyo Digital Private Grave Made by Water Rob Edwards LogicSource InfinVision Sikbox Dark Sky Magazine efingo Claire Coullon Javascript für Designer Stella McCartney MumMade TVLcorps Themes Kingdom Simon Foster Design Airside Not Pretty Neue served Eight Hour Day Prince Street Films Made by TJ Mooze Crafty Woodinville Whiskey Co They Creative Republic2 Ryan Scherf damn good OrangeYouGlad Yii Haunted Cathouse iconSweets2 Shelly Cooper So1o Doodle Pad Source: The Best DesignsunmatchedstyleThe CSS Awards About the Author Gisele Muller loves communication, technology, web, design, movies, gastronomy and creativity. Related Posts 321 shares 11 Inspiring Examples of Textures and Patterns in Web Design Read More 435 shares

@font-face and performance MAJOR CORRECTION: @font-face only blocks rendering in IE when there is a SCRIPT tag above the @font-face declaration. (more info below) Last week I was reading Ajaxian (my favorite blog) and saw the post about @font-face. I had been wondering for a few months about how font files impact web performance, so I followed the story back to Zoltan Hawryluk’s original post: @font-face in Depth. I started doing some research to answer these questions, but during that time there have been a number of great posts about @font-face performance issues: This blog post summarizes Paul, Stoyan, and Zoltan’s findings plus some very important discoveries of my own. FOUT: Flash of Unstyled Text Paul refers to FOUT as the “flash of unstyled text”. Paul comments on two versions of FOUT: re-rendered text – Firefox renders text using a default font while the @font-face file is being downloaded. I found an even worse FOUT issue: IE doesn’t render anything in the page until the font file is done downloading. Caching

28 Inspirational Typographic Designs - Web Design Blog – DesignM.ag Get the FlatPix UI Kit for only $7 - Learn More or Buy Now Here at DesignM.ag there have been plenty of examples of astonishing typography in design, and we are bringing you yet another batch. In the following post I will be sharing with you 28 inspirational typographic designs. Ampersand Food Groups Baroquen Computer Arts Elecktronisk Tirsdag Evolution of Type Fun in the Sun HYPE Art Book I Want Candy Illustration and Typography One More Time Summadayze ID The Person you Love Type Treatment 2010 Typography Projects 3 Typography and Type Treatments and Illustrations Wallpapers Write a Bike About Matthew Heidenreich Currently an Art Director in St.

19 top fonts in 19 top combinations Sign up and download immediately to take your typography to the next level! This classic contains some great stuff: An exceptional glossary of typography terms Killer tips on establishing typographic color Choosing and using the right typefaces 20 Action-packed info-dense pages!

Related: