Ideally speaking, aesthetics is one of the major principles web designers and developers consider in creating websites that will work and cater to the best of their clients’ interests. The typeface you choose can contribute to defining the nature of the website — it sets the tone and the mood of the content, and just generally helps in delivering the website as a whole package. However, in the past there have been typeface limitations that prevented web designers from expressing their inner artists, e.g. being forced to only use web safe fonts.
Until now, using our favorite household web typefaces would mean jumping through hoops due to all the licensing and browsing support issues one would have to deal with. Using real fonts would also mean Flash replacement text, back links and exported images… but things are starting to change. Slowly, the world’s font libraries have started opening their doors and likely it will only be a matter of time until we get access to a selection far greater than Arial and Verdana.
What better way to start than to understand how web font format works. In our opinion, Snook.ca will get you working with real fonts in no time.
You can also check out Typekit.com (http://typekit.com) to get you going on your next web design. Typekit works hand in hand with foundries and provides a chocolate box selection of fonts you can simply mix and match.
For ease and breeze, you can check out Fontsquirrel.com (http://fontsquirrel.com). They’ve done the dirty work for us so we can have various typefaces in easy-to-use format right at our fingertips!
Now more than ever, it gets really exciting to dig in to that very next project and unleash more artistic possibilities with the web. But remember that more possibilities necessitates more responsibilities. We may now have more fonts to choose from, thanks to type designers and foundries, but web developers and designers alike should get ready for the overwhelming resources available on the web. There is joy in this new trend, but there might also be challenges.
Serif and sans serif faces, no matter how limiting in design, work because they are easy to read. The challenge in using your favorite household fonts often lies in legibility and typography. Choosing a type face that jives perfectly with the message you are trying to convey can be tricky when you take into consideration readability and design. But Webfontspecimen.com (http://webfontspecimen.com/) makes the job easier for us. At Webfontspecimen.com you can dry run various faces until you find a match for your web design.
It may only be a matter of time until all our favorite type faces are available for use. Everyday, the possibilities multiply, and our options increase. It will be essential to have an understanding of how effective typeface can be when used deliberately. For now, may this new trend inspire web designers to create more goal-centric websites that are hot and fresh!
Tags: Font, Typeface, Web Copywriting, Web Design and Development
