Applying good typography to the Web (part 3)

When you design for the Web you feel like a warrior who wants the best weapon available. Typography could be a lethal one, but the fact that users cannot see all fonts (since the system fonts are limited) is a problem.

So we had to find a solution. The best one would be a magical way to install some hundreds of font families to all users’ computers. Impossible. The next best alternative was to replace text with something else which would say the same by using the fonts of our liking.

We ended up with two solutions which work well. Which are they?

Text replaced by images

I first read about it several years ago at the website of the Web guru, D. Bowman. (What is written there is now deprecated, but the thought behind it is valuable).

Shortly, this method includes the replacement of text (headings mostly) by images. The designer uses whatever font he wants, he saves the file as an image and he replaces the heading with the image. The result is a heading looking the way we want.

There has been a lot of progress since Bowman’s idea. The great D. Shea gathered the best alternatives in one place so we can have them handy.

sIFR

The above approach is a good one. Maybe not so flexible only. The second solution is called sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) and was first introduced by S. Inman. Since then it was further developed by a number of designers/developers. M. Davidson was one of them.

The two above links should explain the method in depth but let me tell you the short story: sIFR uses Flash, JavaScript and CSS in order to present the fonts we want the way we want. In Flash you write the text by using any possible font. JavaScript embeds the .swf file (Flash) into the document. CSS is responsible for the style and presentation.

An excellent example of the technique applied you can find at the new website of A. Clarke. All the headings there are presented the sIFR way.

sIFR is more complicated than the first method. However it may be proven revolutionary. It is accessible, it can be read by practically all browsers, it is fast and it is under development. Which means that it may be transformed into something even better.

End titles

Before I begin to write this series I was wondering “What more can I say? All has already been told by the gurus”. I decided to go on because I use typography a lot in my work and I couldn’t find all the articles gathered in one place. Of course M. Boulton has done it better than me before.

So is this the end of the series? The short answer is “yes”. I am going to create a special place in this website to have all the articles about typography together. In the future I am sure I will add more content there. Until then, lighter posts are yet to come.