On the tyranny of web safe fonts
I was thinking about web safe fonts, what with my last Geekfindr about those font utilities and I began to wonder about the old initiative to get fonts embeddable into the web experience. So a website could add a little header to their html and the browser would download a font that it could use.. it doesn’t seem to have gotten much traction, and I came across this post on mozilla.org. It made me sad.
It’s a very engineery post - the main reason that people could want to use this technology is to handle alternate languages. They don’t even address the notion that as part of design, fonts are really important. I’m not saying that the tradeoff for supporting this would be worth it, even in that light, but I wonder if they even thought about it and added it into their equation. As I work with a lot of print-centric companies, I see how fonts are part of their brand, part of their look. And that’s not wrong. There’s nothing wrong with Arial and Verdana and Neue Helvetica, but does every site have to use them?
Companies go that extra mile to build headlines and headers as images instead of text to keep their branding up. Why? Because typography has a big effect on design and even if it doesn’t necessarily have a utilitarian impact on your intake of information, it seems to have other effects. There’s a world of fonts out there, fonts for all occasions, but the web is missing out on them. I’m sure there’s also legal/copyright reasons why that world wouldn’t move immediately online given the chance, but I guarantee we’d see a lot more variety.
These fonts were created for a reason in the print world. They proliferated for a reason. Now I’m no designer, so I don’t know what those reasons were. Someone does, though, when you talk to font folks, they bust out all the x-heights and ascenders and when and where things are appropriate. I know when I see a printed page that just comes together the selection of font is a key element of it. Other media allow embedding fonts, like pdf and flash, but the web obstinately refuses them condemning us to a sea of three or four fonts and it’s just starting to depress me.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:25 am
sIFR does a pretty decent job of accommodating fonts for display text. Not exactly a complete solution, but a good tool for what it does.
I like fonts and typography, but I also think there was plenty of content value gained from everybody using same-y monospace typewriters for a century or so.
March 21st, 2007 at 12:31 pm
I’d seen sifr before, it’s pretty cool and a reasonable solution for headlines and the like. It’s, arguably, a better solution that what we have today just using gif’s and png’s. I should probably check it out in a little more detail. :)
But still, if every magazine and every printed thing used one of 4 fonts, I think there’d be a lot less coolness in the world. I’m also not sure I agree that everyone using mono-space typewriters increased content value…
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:27 am
[...] I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on this since Jason commented on the use of sIFR for typographic headlines. As is my way, it took me awhile to get to it which is [...]