Typography and typefaces are such an important part of any brand. Designers spend time creating or choosing a particular typeface to convey and extend a brands visual identity, only then to be confronted with a technical brick wall where the support for these typefaces has been, until fairly recently, non-existent.
Although there are now many more web-safe cross-platform fonts available for designers to use, the options have traditionally been very restricted and tended to limit designers to well-known system fonts such as Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia and Times or creating static graphics using desired fonts instead.
The use of images, however, is a compromise in terms of flexibility, such as when using CMS, and is not the best for accessibility or search engine optimisation. Techniques such as sIFR and Cufon utilise Flash and/or Javascript to replace valid HTML text with a specific font in areas such as headings and menus, in a way that can be easily changed, is search engine friendly and can be accessible to web users with disabilities.
Such techniques are a step in the right direction for creating a genuine extension of your visual identity online but even these methods lack the subtleties and fine tuning that off line typography has.
With great design being at the heart of everything we do at VGroup, we’re always keen to explore these avenues. Most of the websites we’ve built recently utilise these techniques to their fullest, but with the release of new versions of key web browsers, new options are emerging to increase typographic possibilities on the web.
So what is it that’s so good about these new browsers I hear you ask?
At a basic level they now have support for the @font-face CSS rule, which allows designers to reference fonts not installed on the user’s computer. In other words: it allows web designers to store fonts on their server and reference them in CSS, regardless of what fonts the user browsing the page has installed.
There are of course pitfalls to this breakthrough – font licensing being the major issue and there is LOTS of discussion taking place amongst the world’s font foundries to try and resolve the issues. TypeKit is one emerging method that will allow web designers/developers to license a font for use on the web only. This, I feel, is one method that has legs and should go some way to appease the security concerns of the font foundries but there is still a way to go, I’m sure.
In my opinion the future of typography on the web is definitely starting to look brighter, it may well be a few years away from being at a stage where things really start to happen but things are certainly progressing (from a designer’s point of view) in the right direction. Improved aesthetics in web design can only be a good thing and will provide a strong argument for web fonts. Being able to use a font from a set of brand guidelines online will open up a whole new world of possibilities.
With all other forms of design the end result can be controlled in more detail, the web in this respect certainly has some catching up to do, but day by day it’s getting there, which can only be positive for the future of design on the web.