Fontabulous web time

Finally after many many moons we now seem to be getting to the stage where a web designer can pick and choose the fonts they want to use on their websites - About time too! Personally speaking as a connoisseur of typefaces I am extremely excited about being able to use whichever font I like... Currently due to the extremely poor selection of fonts that can be used (and viewed) on the internet it was more often than not about keeping the font small to make its lack of character not immediately apparent but now that is a problem of the past!

No longer are we faced with the option of picking from the lesser evils of verdana, arial, times new roman etc etc. Of course other methods have sprung up to deal with this - See this excellent article for a comparison of some of the many other methods available.

Anyway simply by adding the @font-face tag to your css and putting the fonts up on your server it is now possible to use them very simply and often with a very small page-weight addition (generally each font consumes roughly the same K as a small picture which is quite bearable in today's day and age). As usual though it is not totally simple as it could be due to the differing system each browser uses to render them... (generally as ever good old IE likes to be a little different). Here is an article which describes the process amd problems fairly well.

Anyway far and above the easiest way to do it (and a good place to find out the latest technique) is to use a seriously cool website called - Font Squirrel which has a very impressive selection of free to use fonts! It also will do all the dirty work for you by creating the additional font types and CSS to enable you to use almost any font you own! To do this you need to use the @font-face generator page upload your chosen font(s), adjust the settings, tick a box and download the zipped up file you are given. You can then upload the fonts to your server, cut and paste the CSS you are given and use the font where-ever you want it to go - Easy-peezy and makes a massive difference!