Usability and Web Fonts

Usability is not just about user interaction but has a lot to do with user access. As such, Flash should be considered dead to the designer and developer. We won’t rehearse all of the claims against it (especially the well thought out ones from the hangman’s noose). But basically, we simply recommend against it to all our clients and whenever we are involved in a site development, do not support it.

Font Embedding

That said, how do we go about systematically replacing Flash? One step at a time. The step illuminated here has to do with font embedding. In Flash, the technique is called sIFR, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), and version 3 is now in beta. It is of course possible to use your own fonts with sIFR.

Web Fonts

There are many different approaches to web fonts. All have some limitations (usually limited fonts) but three stand out because of their predominance (sIFR), balance between performance and flexibility (Cufon), a paid option (Typekit), or the name behind it (Google).

Typekit

Typekit is a paid, hosted font service which supports @font-family and so is a bit more flexible (but not entirely free). Not free equals bad and we recommend against this practice.

Google Font

Google Font uses free and open source fonts and makes them available freely and hosts them. There are quite a few fonts now, including khmer, cyrillic and greek as well as over 20 latin character sets (as of 07-11-10). Unfortunately as of now the iphone, ipad and android systems do not support Google Font, but we can guess that they will at some future point.

Note that Google and Typekit have developed a Web Font Loader that can be used to extend the font options that Google provides.

Cufon

Cufon is great, and it is supported by most browsers including the iphone and android browsers. Cufon is similar to Typeface.js, in that it is a javascript library solution without the use of Flash. There are some really great examples of Cufon. Cufon is easy to put together, and is a great replacement for sIFR. It is an elegant solution to the problem of web fonts. Cufon can also be quite easily implemented.

Cufon Fonts

There are currently a whole bunch of fonts that people have made available for Cufon. There are these 10 cufon fonts, these 20 cufon fonts, and this list of over 9,000 cufon fonts.