Monday, January 30, 2012

Use Fonts

By Margaretta Moberly


Although one would never expect it, the fonts on many websites sometimes cause web designers a good deal of frustration. While various computer applications are able to understand the many letters and numbers that are to be displayed on the screen, they must also be told exactly how to display all of these in the proper form and fonts. Creative web designers, until recently, could only select from a small palette of fonts since all fonts are not universal to all programs and applications.

Everything that we see on any computer screen is essentially chunks of information encoded within various file types that must, in turn, be decoded by whatever program or application a person is using. The computer must be able to access the display rendering information within the font files in order for the characters of any text to be displayed as its creator intended. This factor is a significant challenge for designers, since each computer has its own collection of fonts installed, and there are literally thousands of fonts to choose from.

If content is created and displayed, stored and used on one computer, or on a small local network, there will not likely be any problems in displaying the correct fonts and formats. On the other hand, present day websites must be designed for viewing on anything from computers to mobile phones, requiring a more universal display platform to maintain consistency throughout each format. Taking this into consideration, the majority have websites are made with pretty much the same limited range of most common fonts that any web browser is sure to have. Yes, the style of the website will remain consistent throughout the different viewing devices, but this comes at the great expense of limiting a site designer's creativity.

Rather than restrict themselves only to the few fonts most common among different devices, more sites are being designed with fonts from font files that have been stored somewhere else online. From the drastically increased internet connection speeds, it is now possible to store a great amount of font information online, which can be quickly downloaded and displayed without affecting the visitors' site usability in any adverse way.

These web fonts, being centrally located and universally accessible, allow website designers to be more creative with their designs in knowing that their visitors are seeing them exactly as the creator intended. To use a specific web font, the designer must link its relevant display information from the site code, so the web browsers will know exactly where to locate and access it. At that point, it is a simple matter of the designer adding the linked font to the site's CSS like it was any other regular font.

The only possible drawback is that you may have to pay a fee to be allowed to use many of the highly stylized web fonts. It takes time and energy for people to create, encode, and upload their fonts to the web, so paying even a small fee should be a reasonable cost for regular usage of such services. Even still, there are a good number of no cost fonts being made available through what are called open (or free) licenses.




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