Typography and the last great frontier of the web

Good typography has been described as one of the last great frontiers of the web, and a new, simple css rule called @fontface has brought us across that frontier. In a layman's nutshell, "Until now, web designers had to use the roughly 20 web-safe fonts for all live type. Web-safe fonts are the fonts that can be relied on to be present in almost all user’s computers. This is why most web pages now use Verdana, Times, or Arial. . . . New functionality in CSS means that web designers will be able to specify any font for a web page, and all that font will be readable across all platforms and devices," reports Sean King on the Type Directors Club blog.

@fontface (or web font-embedding) is about more than using non-standard fonts, however: it allows designers some of the nuanced control over letter-spacing, baseline-shifts, hyphenation, small caps, and figure selection. . . . just a few of the things that make print typographically superior to the web. Here's a sample:



Firefox 3.5 already supports the @fontface tag. If you've got Firefox 3.5 already you can see @fontface in action here. I believe IE supports @fontface as well. Don't know about Safari.

From an instructional design point of view, this is important: we can move away from unnuanced text settings to pages where designers can respond to the needs of each text. No more conformity of all text to an arbitrary standard. The tyranny of poorly set Verdana and Times New Roman may be at an end. And hurrah, I say.

Read more about this development here.