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Being true to type

by James McGoram

Or, why web designers need you to draw some fonts.

In the beginning, God created the Internet, and saw that it was good. And God made the fonts of the Internet according to their kinds and all of the characters that creep upon the web according to their kind. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the documents and designs, and let the fonts multiply.” But they didn’t. For twenty years the same 12 fonts knocked around together wondering where in the hell the party was.

Fortunately for us all, metaphors come to an end, and perhaps even more fortunately, the reign of terror that was Microsoft’s Core fonts for the web is ending too. Most of you will be aware of the draconian font restrictions that the first few generations of web designers have been lumped with, never straying more than a serif from Georgia, Arial or Verdana. Many of you have probably tried various hacks to get around the restrictions; from simple image-replacement, to Frankenstein Flash-Javascript monsters that re-draw fonts on the fly (dramatically slowing down pages, breaking compatibility and standards and being a general pain-in the arse.) Anything, anything, to have more attractive type online. Fuck future-proofing a page, just give me nice type!

After many false starts (it’s been in and out of the web-standards since the mid-90’s) a robust and easy-to-use method of including fonts in web-documents now exists and is entering more common usage. It’s a CSS declaration called @font-face that links a font to a particular document, providing the typefaces as needed to every user, meaning they don’t have to have that font previously installed to see it rendered on the web page in all of it’s beautiful, cursive glory. I won’t go into the detail, but you can read about it in many popular web-design ‘how-to’ guides (try A List Apart’s introductory article from 2007).

The only problem with this liberating, well-supported and standards-based CSS technique is a legal one. When used, the website is, in effect, giving away a copy of the font to anyone that views the page. For most fonts, this is a breach of the user license under which the font was purchased. So to use the technique in a legally agreeable way, you must be sure you have the right to freely re-distribute it.

OK. Sounds like too much dicking-around, right? And what the hell – I’m not a lawyer, neither are you, and neither of us is interested in becoming a font-pirate (yes, I know that ‘Font-pirate’ is an absolutely ridiculous term, but I didn’t actually make it up…)

No need to resort to murder on the high-seas – there are type designers working, right this very minute, on making awesome fonts available to you for nothing. A resource that is still somewhat under-construction, but well worth the time to visit is the Open Font Library. Google is getting in on the act too.

For now, there are only a few dozen fonts to choose from, and they are scattered across several resources. Improving this takes the community to get involved – and by that I mean you – the design community. You want fonts, you love fonts, you talk about them at every frickin party I go to, so why not start making and publishing them through the Open Font Library. You’ll get the kudos, we’ll get more type, and the web will get just a little bit more attractive (and freer) with every character.