May 26, 2010

Will Font-face Catch On

More buzz about @font-face, which should be all the rage when Firefox 3.5 is officially released:

Typography on the Web is basic and dull. A startup called Typekit will fix it. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine

With @font-face, we’ll finally see custom fonts on the Web—fonts designed to convey a specific tone or emotion, to create distinctive publications or styles, just like in print.

The article also predicts some lucky fonts will go viral. That’s already true now with pipey letters.

Pipe letters are fixed-width and therefore render around the web with predictability, although line-height is still an issue. What remains to be seen with @font-face, will popular social networks encourage experimentation or not? Innovations in typography due to @font-face flourishing chould breathe new life into Myspace, as Facebook, Twitter block all CSS, linebreaks, etc.

Already there is talk about licensing fonts on a per-domain basis which could keep a font from going viral. Typographers able to devise and distribute catchy fonts for free (sans licensing) would gain notoriety and traffic, but to a degree that depends on support from Myspace.

Also, if we can’t use @font-face “inline” (I don’t know yet.) that would discourage casual use:

For example, let’s say someone wants “kool” symbols of cats, dogs, whatever. People will use this if I can say, “Here, cut and paste this one line of code.”

But if trying new fonts requires connecting “style” references in disparate sections of code, this confuses people, and you won’t see as much adoption, creative implementation by non-specialists.

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