Re: Questions re web-fonts

Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:

> 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).

Logos are a special case. You happen to have a logo that can be 
reproduced as live text with an appropriate font, styling, positioning, 
etc., but for the majority of logos this is not the case. I don't think 
logos are going to be a major use of web fonts, and wouldn't recommend 
web fonts as a solution to logos online to any client because of the 
fallback degradation. If companies want scaleable logo art online, they 
should use SVG; otherwise, bitmap graphics will continue to be the norm 
for what are, after all, graphic symbols, not text.

John Hudson

Received on Wednesday, 15 July 2009 17:56:20 UTC