2010: The Year of Better Web Fonts

As the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, many look
with anticipation towards 2010. Working for world peace, a cleaner
environment or a cure for cancer are all noble pursuits, but there’s
only one thing I wish for in the coming new year.

More choices for web typography.

While I appreciate the effort that went into creating and optimizing Verdana and Georgia for the web (and both have recently been updated),
it’s time there were more choices available. Since most of the web’s
content is text, typography plays an important role in aesthetics,
usability and user experience. As a former print designer, I’ve long
desired the ability to use more than just a handful of standard
web-safe fonts in my projects.

Newfangled has implemented sIFR
to embed fonts into some of our sites, but we’ve restricted its use
mostly to page heads because of the slow load time and the clunkiness
of using flash and javascript as a replacement for CSS.

Jason Santa Maria has written a great article on the @font-face
CSS property, a font embedding technique that I think will gain
considerable traction in the coming year. The technology to embed fonts
on a site from a remote server has been around for a while but, until
recently, one of the road blocks was licensing — making sure font
foundries were compensated for the use of their property.

There’s
also the issue of design standards and whether the availablity of a new
crop of web fonts will lead to dynamic and tastefully designed sites or
more candidates for the web design hall of shame. I’m guessing both, but I’m willing to take that risk if for no other reason that to avoid the temptation to use Comic Sans.