Two years of blood, sweat, and bezier curves. That’s what it takes to make your aver­age font fam­ily. Two years of painstak­ing work in an under-appreciated and under­paid indus­try. Too many years to watch your pock­ets picked by an inter­net cul­ture of open source, free dis­tri­b­u­tion. It’s no sur­prise that @font-face scares the beje­sus out of type design­ers. As a result, progress has been slow and atti­tudes more cau­tious about embed­ded type. Read More

Fonts were not designed to mix and match. Sure, we can con­sult the Font Matrix and find an avail­able font. But, tai­lored web safe typog­ra­phy has always been seen as a luxury. With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of desk­top pub­lish­ing soft­ware, com­put­ers are now pre­loaded with more sys­tem fonts than ever before. With greater choice comes greater con­trol. Read More

In my last arti­cle, “The Past and Present of Web Typog­ra­phy”, I’ve dis­cussed alter­na­tives to browser core fonts. Since font replace­ment for para­graphs is unre­al­is­tic, for the time being we have to make do with core fonts. If we’re forced to use these sys­tem fonts what sort of con­trol do we have over set­ting them? Read More

The core four: Geor­gia, Ver­dana, Arial, and Times. Famil­iar to most, as the web safe fonts. All solid choices for max­i­mum com­pat­i­bil­ity. Nearly all of com­put­ers show them accu­rately (as shown below).

Update: Type designer Rod McDon­ald pro­vided cor­rec­tions to my sloppy wiki-research. Read More