Sickdesigner

This week fonts grind my gears. Fonts on the web that is.
Between the CSS @font-face selector & the myriad of font replacement tools available the futureis looking quite bleak. Considering how many pages per day a normal user browses can you imagine how tiring a web where every website has a different body font would be?

@Font-face

When it comes to @font-face I know most designers out there know that there will still be only a handful of fonts that are proper for web use, especially if the end user doesn’t have ClearType enabled.

But. Oh, yes, the ever so present but. You do realize that there will be a mass of designers that will be so overcome with the new found wealth of opentype and truetype fonts readily available to them for free and so bewildered by this that they will forget, if they ever had, any design common sense and start using 14px italic Papyrus for headings.

Wait a second.

Ok, I’m back, I had to go vomit a bit.

But bad designers are not the biggest concern I’m having with @font-face. What is, though, is the fact that clients are going to start having typographic demands spreading beyond the usual “could the heading be in the same font as my logo? what’s that? I suppose it’s called Comic Sans.” and take that extra step to push us [web designers] over the hill and then perhaps we’ll see the first case of a web designer brutally slaughtering a client with a copy of “Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface“.

And it’s not going to be just silly small in-the-dark clients that are going to get behind @font-face. You can see how sites like The Times are going to want to implement the same body font that they use in the printed version of their newspaper. Ok, maybe not The Times but most any other company that primarily uses print as their medium will. With total disregard to the fact that fonts render differently on screens than paper [duh!].

Font replacement methods

Cúfon, FLIR, sIFR, Typeface are just some of the methods some designers use to apply non-standard font on the web. I could go on telling you why they all fail immensly but since you read this far I imagine you already know about the inevitable pitfalls these systems encounter. Instead here’s, probably, a new perspective on these methods: why would anyone use a system that is sluggish, fails in older browsers, fails on some mobile devices, is a pain to implement [rather than using regular images to which you would keep your source files] and most importantly does not allow for any non css styling [like you would use with a picture]? I have not, will not, cannot use such a system and still call myself a real web designer. To me this is close to using 2001 style DHTML on a table structure.

Remember when i said these do not grind my gears as bad as other things? They don’t because the logic and genius behind implementing the font-replacement methods is just that: genius. I tip my hat with great respect to the likes of Simo Kinnunen, Mike Davidson or Cory Mawhorter for their wit and smarts.

And just before I go, here’s a little something I found for all you Comic Sans haters out there. Including me.