I’ll be the first to admit that for the longest time I thought Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana were the only fonts you could safely use on the web. When I was first getting starting in development, these were the only fonts sites used, and as such I never had reason to believe otherwise. Well after four or five years of working with some pretty talented designers, the importance of typography started to rub off. I’ve compiled a list of some of the most eye-opening typography-for-developers articles that I’ve read, mostly concerning the breadth of fonts that we can actually use in development now:
- Fonts for web design: a primer: An excellent starting point for exploring additional, common fonts cross-OS. I was particularly happy to see an explanation as to why some fonts are available on some systems, but not others.
- Common fonts to all versions of Windows & Mac equivalents: Basically a summary of the above, in an easy-to-reference format.
- 8 Definitive Web Font Stacks: Leverages the flexibility of the font stack to implement nicer fonts for users that have those fonts on their machines.
- Methods for uncommon font rendering: In addition to web-ready fonts, there are several methods/technologies that allow you to essentially embed uncommon fonts on your site. Beautiful fonts with @font-face is a good summary of the potential for straight CSS-level font embeds; although there are legal hurdles that you need to take into account. Finally, cufón and sIFR are two popular methods for embedding custom fonts, with the help of some JavaScript and/or Flash.
My previous experience has shown that designers are happy for the most part with the set of available web-ready fonts, and cases where you need a method for rendering uncommon fonts are few and far between. I imagine a unified, efficient solution for embedding fonts (read: @font-face) would change the playing field, but legal issues may hamper that reality for some time. In the meantime, it’s good to know there’s at least some easy-to-implement alternatives to Arial, Times, and Verdana, and the potential for using almost any font in certain situations if you have the time for a solid implementation.
