heisel.org

Fonts fonts fonts

Wednesday | March 5, 2003 | 11:28 pm  

Jay Small wrote a great piece look­ing at how XP and OS X make text easier to read using font smoothing.

While I agree with Jay that the improv­ing look of text on com­puter screens is good, I’d just like to point out that it does not mean the end of putting text into GIFs.

While one of the two prob­lems, read­abil­ity, has been solved by the font smooth­ing capa­bil­i­ties of oper­at­ing sys­tems, the other — con­vey­ing mean­ing through type — remains.

Don’t get me wrong, Geor­gia, Hel­vetica, Times and Ver­dana are great, but most design­ers would prob­a­bly like access to a wider selec­tion of typefaces.

First of all, my argu­ment is based on the premise that design is con­tent. Take a look at my site in Comic Sans. I’d like to think that evokes, at least sub­con­sciously, a dif­fer­ent mean­ing for you.

The “content,” the words, are still the same, but visu­als — type, photos, color — all add, or sub­tract from the content.

There are times, such as Web fea­ture designs, when a designer needs to pull a type­face out his arse­nal that not every­body is going to have on their computer.

Hence, we put type in GIFs.

Believe me, I don’t like it. It takes the text out of the HTML, it limits the type to a size that may be inap­pro­pri­ate on a very large or very small mon­i­tor — it breaks the fun­da­men­tal design prin­ci­ple of the Web, flexibility.

But, it con­veys the mean­ing the designer needs to send.

I’m not push­ing for GIF type to live on for­ever, I want a better solution.

Open Type looks like a good start. It’s a type format that is easily inter­change­able between PCs and Macs.

Now, about some browser ven­dors work on a stan­dards com­pli­ant way to stream an Open Type face or some­thing sim­i­lar down to our users so we can have the best of both worlds: visual con­tent and flex­i­ble design.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design