Fonts on the internet: What are our options?

Let’s have some typography talk now. We will talk about the fonts you could use on the internet. Fonts that are safe to use in your website to produce a quality layout with the fitting typography choices.

Why safe?

I realize myself almost every day there are so many awesome fonts out there. A couple weeks back I looked at a post over at Noupe that featured some great fonts from deviantART. Lovely, those fonts. I want to use them, but I simply can’t, because it doesn’t show on every computer. Why? Because not every visitor has that font installed on their computer.

What can we do about it? Nothing. It’s the same problem we have with Internet Explorer 6, it just doesn’t leave the scene, because there are still too many people who use it. We just can’t say, “All computer users, install this disk with free fonts”. Even if we did that, not everyone will install the fonts, and the problem isn’t solved.

So, we have a problem. Where the solution? We always have those people that started to look for some inventive solutions. They found them, take a look below for at a couple of ‘em.

Web Safe Fonts

To give your paragraphs, headings and titles a somewhat special look even with normal fonts, we have to improvise with the possibilities that are available (take a look around, we all have to deal with the problem): fonts that are installed by default on most (if not all) operating systems and therefore we have the best chance these fonts work.

Dustin Brewer has done some great researching work when he wrote this post. Fortunately for us, we now have a complete list (or almost!) of the fonts we could use on the internet, without fearing some people don’t see our content.

sIFR

In the past, I have wrote a tutorial about this technique (it’s aged now). sIFR is a combination of Flash, HTML, CSS and Javascript and I know, that sounds hard. But really, it is not that bad.

Recently, sIFR has released a great new version, called sIFR 3.0 and it has gone a long way since its first release. It has features like text-resizing, turning sIFR on/off and printing solutions. Take a look on the site for more features.

This is an awesome solution to our little problem, at least for headings or titles.

Image Replacement

Another way to include some sexy fonts in your website is by using images. You know, those images you designed in Photoshop with a special font and replaced with the original, standard looking heading. But, what if you run a blog, should you be designing a image for every post you write?

Of course not, we have inventive people with us on the web. There are plenty of software packages around that show you how to use image replacement on a user friendly and accessible way.

FLIR is the one I recently read about, and I think we will hear loads of this technique in the future. Oh yeah, here is a tutorial to learn how to install and use FLIR on your website.

Any More?

I am sure there are more tips and tricks available but usually those aren’t the best. Maybe they have problems with accessibility or it’s not compatible on every computer. If I have forgotten your personal favorite or an absolute awesome kit, comment and I will add it to the list.

Cheers.