Re: Questions re web-fonts

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:39 AM, John Hudson<tiro@tiro.com> wrote:
> I also suspect that much of the user base sitting
> on older versions for longer represents, on the one hand, major site
> installations with conservative IT policies, and on the other hand people
> like my mother who are only going to upgrade software when someone else
> comes and does it for them. Neither of these user types strikes me as a
> major target for websites with fancy new typography: they're people who
> either want to maintain a known system or who are content with what they've
> got. Since any web font implementation is going to include fallbacks to
> exactly the same level of typographic (un)sophistication that these users
> find satisfactory, I fail to see what isn't 'truly usable' about any format
> that one can get into the code and out the door.

Well, for one, many of the uses for really fancy fonts are for
headlines, logos, and the like.  Currently these are mostly done
through images.  Once font-linking becomes truly usable, though
(combined with other advanced text effects like text-shadow), we may
start to see a gradual replacement of text-in-images with real text,
styled to the logo.

I recently did some experiments with my company's logo, and it looks
wonderful as real text appropriately styled, using a combination of
fonts, position, letter-spacing, and other properties.  However, the
fonts used aren't widely installed.  If I switched to doing this using
a webfont format that isn't yet widely supported, the logo would still
be viewable and sensical, but it wouldn't be *our logo*.  That's not
really acceptable from a corporate point of view, so in the meantime I
have to continue to produce a new image for every iteration of our
logo wherever it appears.  Sometimes the style really *is* important.

In a more general case, the Advertising department that feeds me page
designs won't accept me saying "yeah, at least half of our customers
won't see the heading in the pretty font, but it'll at least still be
visible!".  They want designs that match their photoshop mockups,
which currently means image slicing for me (with @alts to maintain
accessibility, of course).

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 15 July 2009 17:06:59 UTC