New possibilities for typography on the web

Some of you that know me (Brett) may know that I’m kind of a typography nerd. Luke makes fun of me about it, but it’s ok. I’m secure in my love of type.

One of the constant frustrations with web design is the lack of fonts. When you switch to Arial for a project just because you’re tired of Verdana, Trebuchet, or the Lucida variants… you know you’re in bad shape. For the past few years the most trouble-free method for using the font of your dreams has been sIFR and it’s offspring, and while that’s still arguably the most solid option, there are some other methods available now that are making me get excited about the future of type on the web.

Embedded Fonts with @font-face

Even though this is currently Safari 3.1+ and IE7 only (and they do it differently, but that’s another discussion), it’s still interesting. Ralf Herrmann has a list of 10 fonts that might pique your interest, even if only to know what’s on the horizon.

Facelift Image Replacement makes me happy

I recently discovered Cory Mawhorter’s FLIR, Facelift Image Replacement, and I’m quite excited about some of the possibilities it opens up. While sIFR can do much of what FLIR can do, it’s always good to have options, particularly when they can look as good as this. That FLIR is built with a plugin architecture is brilliant as well, and it seems to be silly fast.

In case you’re not tempted to check out that link, it allows:
* anti-aliasing
* transparent backgrounds (with alpha transparency, even)
* gradients in the letters (yeah, for real… I’m really excited about that)
* drop-shadows
* borders on letters
* word wrapping and blocks of text

Check out the examples. Quite interesting. We may use it on the next version of FoxyCart.com, and if so I’ll do a more complete writeup.