To hell with
WEB SAFE
FONTS
Lennart Schoors

Me
. web designer at Netlog
http://www.netlog.com
. blog at http://lensco.be

Web Safe Fonts
Fonts on the internet today

You can do cool things with Times New Roman

But still ...
. Verdana
. Arial (Helvetica if you’re lucky)
. Lucida Grande
. Georgia
. limited, sometimes boring font stacks

Alternatives
. image replacement, sIFR, Cufon, ...
. accessibility
. maintenance
. often hard to get it just right
. flash of content
. dependency (Javascript, Flash)
. more pain in the ass than they should be

Solutions?
Option one: spice up your font stacks

font-family: Plantin, \"Plantin std\", \"Plantin\",
\"Baskerville\", Georgia, \"Times New Roman\", serif;

Go wild!
. Vista/Office fonts
. Calibri, Candara, Corbel, Cambria, ...
. Centhury Gothic, Rockwell,
Garamond, Gill Sans, ...
. (OS X) system fonts
. American Typewriter, Futura, Optima,
Palatino, Helvetica Neue (weights!), ...

. type foundry fonts
. Frutiger, Meta, Archer, Gotham, DIN, ...
. watch your fallbacks (weight, width)
. The Quick Brown Fox
. The Quick Brown Fox
. The Quick Brown Fox

check the font matrix: icanhaz.com/fontmatrix

Solutions?
Option two: font-embedding

@font-face
. part of CSS2
. simple
@font-face {
font-family: \"Fontin Sans\";
src: url(FontinSans.otf);
}
h1 { font-family: \"Fontin Sans\", serif; }

Support
. Safari 3.1
. Firefox 3.5
. Opera 10
. IE4

Since IE4!? What’s the catch?
. Embedded Open Type (EOT)
. encoded & limited
. WEFT (Web Embedding Fonts Tool)

WEFT 3.2 (°2003) – cumbersome and annoying

IE implementation
IE chokes on prescribed procedure, so:
<!--[if IE]>
<style>
@font-face {
font-family: \"Fontin Sans\";
src: url(FontinSans.eot);
}
</style>
<![endif]-->

The piracy issue
. EOT = new standard?
. fear of ‘DRM’
. Access Control Headers
. Foundries are hesitant
. Similar to music and movie industries
. Why not experiment with hosted,
licensed fonts?

Until then
. www.webfonts.info
. www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com
. Popular free fonts for embedding:
. Graublau Sans Web, Fertigo, Fontin,
Fontin Sans, Kaffeesatz, Museo, ...

Summary:
Get creative

Get creative!
. Expand your font choice
. Mix fonts (like em, strong, links, quotes, ...)
. Use weights, font-styles, small caps,
(font-stretch), ...
. Mind variations in size and legibility
. Test all fonts in your stack on all platforms

Rockwell, Helvetica Neue, Optima and Andale
Mono on www.lensco.be

We got rid of the
“web safe” colors,
now let’s get rid of
“web safe” fonts!

That’s all folks!
. http://www.seedconference.com/
. http://www.markboultondesign.com
. http://24ways.org/2007/increase-your-font-stacks-with-font-matrix
. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3/default.htm
. http://jontangerine.com/log/2008/10/font-face-in-ie-making-web-fonts-work
. http://webtypography.net/talks/skillswap09/
Read on at http://lensco.be