Blog Post #5: Web Typography

One of the big frustrations that designers have about designing for the Web is the historically poor state of web typography. As web designers strive for consistency across platforms, they have been forced to rely on only a small set of commonly installed fonts, knowing that their ideal choice of font may not be installed on the end-users system. As a result, designers would often turn to creating images for their headers and subheads (pictures of text instead of actual text), but this has never been a good choice for body copy as it has some draw backs in terms of file size, semantic markup, and accessibility. However, many people feel that typography on the web is finally beginning to mature. Why is that? What is the @font-face declaration and what are the implications of downloadable and/or hosted fonts? What is WOFF and why is it significant? What are your impressions about the current state (and future) of Web Typography?

I think that people are saying web typography is maturing because of the introduction of the @font-face declaration with CSS3. W3 puts it well:

"The @font-face rule allows for linking to fonts that are automatically activated when needed. This allows authors to select a font that closely matches the design goals for a given page rather than limiting the font choice to a set of fonts available on all platforms."

I for one am happy that this functionality is finally available, as I am one of those people who have created images for headers (usually banners). I also have found many interesting fonts on the Absolute Font Archive that I would like to use, and I regularly bookmark Smashing Magazine's articles on fonts and typography. Before the arrival of @font-face, though, you had to stick with what fonts people were likely to have on their computers, and that list is pretty limited. But with @font-face, all those great fonts people have created and put on the internet for download can finally be put to use!

I have not played around with WOFF, but apparently it means "Web Open Font Format" and is what is used to embed fonts in pages. It is also significant in that it compresses said data, allowing for pages to have smaller file size and thus load faster. And of course, we always want our pages to load faster. I mean, it's kind of common web courtesy nowadays.

I have to say, I'm excited about where web typography could go with the arrival of @font-face. As I said before, it will allow so many more interesting fonts to get some use. This will allow designers to make web pages so much more unique too. And UNIQUE IS GOOD!

I apologize if my commentary on this is sparse; it's a subject I'm interested in but don't know a ton about. (Plus I'm kinda tired out from doing Exercise 3). Still, a development like this is worth blogging about, right?!

Oh, and by the way, I chose not to do Blog Post Topic #4. Hence the jump from #3 and #5.