Tag: FONTS

Web fonts have been available to Blogger users since late last year, when Google introduced 32 ready-to-use typefaces to spice up your blog's design. Now, Google has more than doubled that number -- bringing the total to a whopping 77 fonts, all of which render nicely in just about any Web browser. No, they don't work in IE6. You'll find the new fonts in the Blogger Template Designer behind ...

One of the most time consuming activities in graphic and Web design is the picking of fonts. It's basically a crap shoot: there's no way to see what text will look like until after you've selected a font -- and when you have a list of 200 fonts to get through, the process can be painstakingly tiresome. That's where Wordmark.it comes in; it's a Web app that scans your computer for installed fonts, ...

Here's one for the font nerds: there's a CSS declaration called optimizeLegibility that fixes kerning and ligatures in a lot of Web fonts. For the less design-savvy amongst us, that means it makes sure certain letter pairs are spaced properly and combined into special characters where appropriate. Designers don't always use optimizeLegibility, though, so it's time to take matters into your own ...

FontFonter is a neat tool from FontShop that lets you render a live copy of any Web page using FontShop's proprietary Web fonts. Font prices are in the hundreds of dollars (the "affordable" ones are around the $150 mark), so it's certainly nice to be able to preview what your site will look like with such a font before spending all of that money. It would be truly great (and magnanimous, even) ...

Google Font Preview is a new way to play with Google's Web Fonts API. The API is already dead-easy to use: you just include a single line of text in your Web page source code, and you can use fonts in your CSS. But that's "ease of use" defined in web developer terms... What about the designer types who don't always feel like messing around with code just to see what stuff looks like on the ...

Type Folly is a tour de force, showing how far JavaScript and CSS have come. When I first openend the page I got a canvas with all sorts of text, which looks like an image. But then I clicked it, and discovered I can drag stuff around. Then I noticed the tool panes on the sides; they look like Photoshop tool panes, but are implemented in JavaScript and are fully functional. There are layers, and ...

Fonts Live is a service which lets you embed beautiful fonts right on your Web page. They have a catalog of 200 fonts, and they are all quite lovely. Does the idea ring a bell? Maybe it's because Google has a very similar service which is totally free! This is something that really astounds me. How can you offer a service for such rates and expect to make money, when a behemoth like Google is ...

WhatTheFont is pretty much the established player in the font identification market. The service's claim to fame is its ability to figure out what font is used in a particular image (or try to, at least). A new contender, called IdentifyFonts (original naming there!), recently came into this same space. Since they are so similar, I felt a head-to-head comparison would be the obvious thing to ...

Typography on the web is a major source of difficulty for designers today. There are so few "web-safe" fonts, and there's no standard way to bring new ones into the equation. Well, Google has taken a big step toward addressing that problem, by introducing an open source font library, and an API that makes it easy to use the new fonts on your own webpage. That means that along with Georgia, ...

When it comes to making web pages, I can whip up a rounded div or add a splash of gradient for a nice fade effect successfully with little trouble, but like many, when trying to deduce out why some stupid DIV is misbehaving, I can waste an entire day spinning my wheels. Checking out the various blogs and forums are of course a great resource, but probably my most useful and productive help ...

If you're looking for an easy way to port some of your favorite Apple fonts over to Ubuntu, here it is! I've just started to get exposed to alternative OSes like Ubuntu and was really excited to find a way to easily get some of my favorite fonts over to it quickly and easily. TechSource has provided a really great tutorial on how to access those fonts without a lot of fuss. To get started, open ...

Earlier in the month we covered Cheese or Font - a fantastic perpetually-running time-waster that challenges you to choose whether the name displayed refers to a cheese or a font. However, the web is buzzing (at least, in some circles) about a far more nerdy variant: Helvetica vs Arial in Ironic Sans' "So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?" quiz. You're shown 20 logos, each rendered in ...

Typography on the web has always been a delicate topic, and the source of a lot of tension between web designers, type designers, and standards gurus. Websites should have quality type choices available for all of their readers, but type designers deserve to be compensated for their hard work. The appropriate standard and the appropriate license have been debated for years. Typekit, launching this ...

Finding free fonts on the net isn't really all that hard - the list of sites offering gratis typefaces is a pretty one. Good quality fonts? That's a slightly shorter list. Good quality free fonts that can be used commercially? That list is even smaller. Thankfully, the good folks behind Font Squirrel have worked their tails off putting together a large collection (currently 338) hand-selected ...

Looking for a fast, easy way to preview the fonts you have installed on your computer? It doesn't get much easier than visiting Flipping Typical. Head over to the site and within seconds it will render a table of all your typefaces. Initially the preview text will read "flipping typical," but you can delete it and enter whatever you like. To swap the primary font at the top of the page, simply ...