Web Design For Idiots

If you are into design, then you absolutely know the importance of text and typefaces in design. If you are into web design, you know the important of plain text in web pages for search engine’s to index. The dilemma – you can only use fonts that are available on everyone’s computers (system fonts) when you design a web site or you have to use a graphic of the text with the font of your choice. Obviously you generally have to make a sacrifice somewhere  – give up the font or give up the indexable text.

Now, one of the things that people will say is to use “alt” tags in your images, this puts indexable text into your image. This works for search engines, but from what we know about how google specifically indexes a website, there is a different “weight” put on the different elements in your website. For instance, lines of text with a head tag (<h1> or <h2>) will be considered important text on the web pages. “Alt” text is not as high up there in the ranks, so although alt tags can be useful, they arent ideal to replace text.

So that still leaves the web designer in a place where they have to compromise one for the other. SEO or DESIGN?

Well, not any more!!!!

There have been huge movements in the direction of making many fonts available for use on the internet, and this is a wonderful thing. About a month ago I discovered and wrote about Cufon (you can read it here). It was a new technology that I had not really wrapped my head around, but seemed like it was going to be an amazing tool. This tool, however is very complex and seems to take a lot of knowledge and has a pretty big learning curve. I have yet to delve into this program, and as soon as I do, I will post here about it. I would love to know, if you have used it, how you like it.

But now there is an even newer movement towards fonts on the world wide web. Typekit is a web application that will likely be subscription based, that will basically open up a world of fonts that you can use on your web pages. This is extremely exciting to us web designers because now there is absolutely no need to compromise, you can have your text and eat it too!

The movement towards web wide fonts is not just flowing through typekit – it has been something web designers and developers have been pushing for. W3C has been working on a movement towards a standard for using fonts in websites, unfortunately like with all large changes in web coding, this will be very sketchy at first and unlikely to be a great option until all browsers are confirmed to be compatible with this new coding. The use of @fontface is available but again, sketchy at best and unlikely to yield as good results as typekit will. This new CSS3 rule also has the type foundries up in arms about the possibility that their fonts will be available on the web with clearly written file paths to each font used on the page. Much like when you view the source code of a website and you can see the file path to the external javascript and css files, you will be able to see the location of the font files. Clearly you can see why this is not ideal for those who create and sell their fonts and the foundries have taken steps to prevent this by stating in their user lisences that the font is not to be used on the web (which means even though you can you shouldn’t)

So back to TypeKit.

TypeKit plans on creating a subscription based product where TypeKit will own some type of resellers license for a preset list of fonts that will be within their font library. When you sign up, you will pay a yearly fee and have access to various numbers of fonts. They are unsure of how the pricing structure will work still, but in my mind, the best option would be to set price break levels. So people can sign up to have 5 standard fonts, 5 premium fonts, 10 standard, 10 premium fonts and so on. Where the standard and premium are defined by their price level at the basic licensing value. This is just what i think would be best, this is not specifically what they are going to do.

One of the best things about TypeKit is, it is going to make this usable for everyone. Adding a font to your website will end up being as simple as copying and pasting code from their website into your website, or as complex as coding your own calls to the TypeKit servers. TypeKit will encrypt the fonts and pass it through a tool that will decode the fonts and display them on the web. They hope that this will help to entice the type foundries to offer web licensing specifically through their company because of the added layer of security that you would not typically have with a font hosted on your own server using the @fontface code.

I hope that whomever it is that comes up with the end all be all of fonts on the web script, it happens soon. It is my biggest hurdle to jump when trying to design for the web, and having most of these fonts available on the web would be an amazingly awesome step in the right direction.

KEEP GOING ON TYPEKIT!

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Want to know who is offering this awesome content? Here it is! Someone who is relatively new to web design. I am new enough to still remember how absolutely frustrating it was to try and get anything done in this field, but have also been around long enough to be able to help those that are where I was a year ago. Aside from web design, I run the office of my dad's engineering business, and do book keeping by trade. I love my pets.. All 6 cats, 1 peg legged dogs, and 1 hedgehog. LOVE THEM!! Oh yea, and my husband. He lets me chase my dreams and I let him do the same. We are happy people because of it. Read more from this author

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.