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06.09
The Dark Age of Web Fonts... Sort of Almost Kinda Nearly Starting to End, Maybe
Starts and stops and workarounds and hacks. Remember when the first generation iPhone came out, big, round, heavy, slow, limited in features that other phones had but everyone knew it was the future? Sure, it didn't support MMS. But hey, you could jailbreak your phone, void your warranty and add a new strange thing called an "app" that did support it. Or, surf around enough forums and you could find a weird workaround where you could send an e-mail as an MMS, so that basically solved the problem, right?
Well, what really solved the problem of unsupported MMS was when the iPhone and AT&T finally actually supported MMS.
And that's pretty much a metaphor for where we are with fonts on the Web. There are still only seven Web-safe fonts: Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, Trebuchet MS (relatively recent) and Lucida Sans (to some extent). It's not as limiting as it sounds, but we all know that eventually we will look back on these days and laugh about our typography choices. Let's see... should I use Georgia? Or Times? Or Georgia? Or Times?
There are ways around it. You can make an image out of whatever font you want — this practice is still widely used. But it is not advisable. For the non-web-savvy reading this, on a website, you want as much text as possible to be "readable" by Google. Using Web-safe fonts means you can keep text "live" (if it's selectable, it's live) and readable by search engine crawlers. If text is part of an image, Google is blind to it. And this still is an unethical way around the issue of licensing... a whole other blog post in itself.
There are also tools in use that allow a wider range of fonts to be displayed as live text, but to carry them with you at all times still requires a big, heavy tool belt that, if not worn tight enough, will definitely show your design ass.
Yesterday on A List Apart, Richard Fink posted a wonderful, comprehensive article assessing the state of Web fonts. Behold an excerpt from his summary:
All together now, let’s get really confused: for IE 6–8 you can only use TTF fonts wrapped up as EOT or EOT “Lite” (uncompressed). For Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari, you can deliver TTF or OTF files either “raw” or, in some cases, wrapped up as WOFF files or as data URI’s inside a stylesheet. SVG will surely be a major font format going forward but its main virtue today is support in Mobile Safari for the iPhone and iPad. Got that?
Yes! Sweet! Oh, wait, no, that still sucks. But hey, if you are savvy and vigilant about design, as Fink suggests, you will find a way to make beautiful typography.
Unless you're Apple.
Apple has a largely deserved reputation as a champion of good design. But at practically the same time A List Apart published Fink's article, and on the same day Steve Job's WWDC keynote was made available, NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinn posted an article on his still-beautiful blog Subtraction.com, astutely observing Apple's apparent indifference to typography. From the post:
Here’s an example. In one of the elaborately produced, incredibly self-congratulatory promotional videos that the company released to announce the arrival of iPhone 4, one particularly outrageous moment stuck out for me. At about three minutes into the video, senior vice president for iPhone software Scott Forstall extolls the virtues of the Retina Display by declaring that “The text… is just perfect!” Meanwhile, the central image in the video at just that moment is this little typographic calamity:
I urge you to fast-forward the time code to 3:02 to hear this for yourself. Forstall is quite literally claiming perfection while a hand model holds up this terrible example of everything that’s wrong with Apple’s commitment to typography. While the letterforms on that virtual page may look gorgeous, it’s apparent to any designer that the text is far from perfectly typeset. It’s hideous, scarred as it is by unsightly “rivers” of bad spacing within the text. No self-respecting typographer would dare call that perfect.
I encourage you to read the articles for youself. We may be at a crossroads with Web font support, but it's still pretty much an intersection of a dirt road and an interstate. Frogger, anyone?
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