Sunday 30 December 2012

In Their Right Place


At the moment there are several ways to use non-system fonts on a website. We will focus on the two least complicated, least expensive systems, Google Web Fonts and @font-face rule, though we have not ruled out other paying methods such as Typekit, Fonts.com webfonts, Fontdeck, Webtype, WebINK or Fontspring for future posts. They offer high quality typefaces and deserve to be considered. It’s important to be aware that webfonts can generate inadequate visualizations on operating systems that have subpixel rendering turned off, such as Windows XP, or represented differently depending on the browser. For these reasons, another important point of this post is to facilitate the choice of a series of fonts, out of the hundreds available, whose technical and visual characteristics make them more readable and compatible with the wide variety of devices, browsers and operating systems that are out there. Basically, there are two implementation models:

  1. Web font embedding services 
  2. Embedding fonts using @font-face rule

Web font embedding services 

Google Web Fonts (GWF) or Typekit are systems which allow the use of fonts hosted on their servers. GWF is free to use, does not require you to have an account and has no limit on traffic or domains as in the case of Typekit, which sets the cost of the service according to the number of domains in which the font is used or the site’s monthly traffic. One of the most valued characteristics of GWF is the option to download a desktop version of the fonts for use in the mockup phase of projects.

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