Fun With Fonts
For those folks who read my blog as an RSS feed, or those who read it with an older browser (such as Internet Explorer 5.0 or less, Firefox 2.0, Safari 1.0, or others), you won’t notice much of a change, but if you are looking at this page or others with a newer browser, you should be seeing some interesting changes: mainly the fonts for the headlines and body type. How did I do this? I’ve been playing with the typekit service (www.typekit.com — if you don’t see anything yet, it’s because I got an early invitation. They’ll be going live for the general public soon, I think. ), which has started to post web fonts for those people designing and building web sites, as well as the browsers that can see them, and they’ll be offering a free account with 2 fonts on a single URL. I decided to use the font “M+ 1c” for the headlines and “Droid Serif” (which is actually one of the fonts designed for onscreen reading on the Google Android OS) for the body copy. I probably will need to tweak some other settings and CSS (Comments and a few other items in the content areas are still showing up in Georgia), but overall, I’m intrigued with the prospect of web sites and blogs that use fonts other than the 6 or 7 that we’ve been seeing regularly for the past 10 years or so. I hope this does catch on, as I think it could spur a renaissance in web design. In the meantime, it’s always a thrill to be an early adopter and catch some of this at the beginning.
5 Comments
5 Comments to “Fun With Fonts”
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Cara
Posted: Aug 26th, 2009 at 9:21 am1Perhaps it’s my browser but I find the new type face makes the words squished and harder to read.
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David Drucker
Posted: Aug 26th, 2009 at 10:02 am2Interesting. What browser are you using? Do you think you could send me a screenshot?
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Jan Karlsbjerg
Posted: Aug 26th, 2009 at 9:15 pm3Yeah, can’t say I’m impressed either. I’ll email you a couple of screenshots.
In IE8, the bottom of the dips are cut off (p, g, y, etc.). This is independent of text size.
Also, I thought the rule of thumb was to use serifs for body text in print, but sans serif for body text on the screen?
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Jan Karlsbjerg
Posted: Aug 26th, 2009 at 9:18 pm4Correction, the IE8 cutting-off-issue IS dependent on text size.
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David Drucker
Posted: Aug 27th, 2009 at 8:00 am5Yeah, thanks for the shots. I guess I was so excited to get new fonts that they looked better than I admit they do now. I’ll have to try some others. I guess sans serif choices might turn out better for the body text, since this was supposed to be the best of the serif choices from typekit. I wish they’d open up for everyone so I could show the different types that I tried.
Actually, I had read that serif is still good for body text, both on screen and in print, because the serifs help you distinguish every letter. Can’t remember when and where I read that.
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