WordCamp to go: Web typography

This is my second post from information I took away from WordCamp Birmingham. The notes below are simply things that were new or important to me and do not begin to cover all of the information offered. I’d recommend following the SlideShare links for more details.

Web Typography

The biggest advantage to using advanced web typography is you can move away from standard web fonts, such as Arial, Verdana and Times and start using a wider collection of elegant and creative fonts available at online foundries.

The most important thing I took away from Sara Cannon’s presentation is it’s not as difficult to use embedded fonts as I imagined it to be. A couple of lines of JavaScript from one of the services listed below is all that’s needed to get started. Sara’s presentation on Advance Web Typography is also available on SlideShare.

If you want to get started it’s as simple as visiting one of the following sites and following their instructions:

• Typekit
• Font Squirrel
• Fontspring
• Google Web Fonts

Here are some examples, from Sara’s presentation, of web typography in use:

• Lost World’s Fairs
• SXSW Beer Camp (Expired link removed)
• Typekit Design Gallery

And, also from the presentation, web font blogs to see what’s new:

• http://blog.typekit.com
• http://fontsquirrel.com/blog

If you’re concerned with FOUT, or the “Flash of Unstyled Text” you sometimes see on websites using embedded fonts, watch Sara’s SlideShare for information on using a web font loader to combat the problem. This seemed to be the most technical issue involved with advanced typography, but it doesn’t look like it would be too difficult for anyone with intermediate html coding skills.