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Well guys, I had this great big well thought out blog post half ready to go and I was excited about it. But suddenly it was my blog week, it snowed projects and I decided to go to Australia for three weeks leaving my co-workers to deal with the snowstorm. So here I am, the evening before my 6am departure across the world and I have nothing but my shoes packed so instead of my very well thought out blog post I thought I'd tell you about the best thing that happened this week (so far).
Fear not, it's not about the sandwich I had on Tuesday (which was fantastic) it's perfectly nerdy. This week I got to try out licensed web fonts. What is licensed web font you may ask? Web font embedding is a technique that allows you to specify any crazy font you can find with the proper license and embed in into your web pages...sort of. Basically what happens is you purchase a web font license, which seem to be yearly licenses for the most part. The license issuer will then give you a remote file to link to in your <head> tag and the font-family tag to use and you're sailing, able to specify this completely unweb-safe font anywhere on your site using css. When a visitor without the font visits your page the font is downloaded onto their system and your beautifully chosen typography shines through without flash, without images. It's a very smooth process and makes styling website typography a total breeze.
This process is not without it's controversy however, type foundries are a bit slow coming around but there is currently quite a large bank of licenses to purchase. Browser support is another issue but currently all the major modern browsers are supported (but only barely). You may be surprised to hear that Internet Explorer is even on board as far back as 5.0; using their own proprietary format of course.
At the moment Smallbox is just trying this out but hopefully I'll be able to update this post when the site goes live as an example of success. This is a technique that really did make my week and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop to break my little web typographer's heart.
Feel free to indulge my laziness and let me know of all the negative points I missed in my research. That's what comments are for!
For more information check out these links :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_typography
http://www.ascendercorp.com/info/web-fonts/
See you in a few weeks!
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