Adrian has a post titled Five Steps to Font Freedom on the Be A Design Group blog. I’ve quoted some of it below:
There is something absurd about typography on the web. Think about these scenarios: You don’t need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don’t need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don’t need to own Times to read the Times. You don’t need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane. And yet this same logic doesn’t apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser. You are reading Arial right now. That’s right, Arial. Why? Because everybody on Earth has a licensed version of Arial on their computer. The great democracy of the internet has failed to produce typography any better than the least common denominator of system fonts. As a designer, I hope you are outraged and offended. So what can you do about it?
Those who know me (or have seen me speak) know that I feel pretty strongly about the lack of variety in widely distributed fonts. Almost every page uses one of the same five fonts (Verdana, Georgia, Arial, Lucida Sans, or Times). The lack of variety can make it tough to create strong branding and beautiful designs on the web.
Designers tend to work around this issue by creating text in Photoshop or Illustrator and exporting to an image. Flash also provides the ability to use fonts that aren’t locally installed (this is the key to the popular Sifr technique). Unfortunately neither technique works well for reading long documents.
The release of Vista will help (but not solve the issue) for two reasons:
- New high-quality fonts: Poynter was the first to show the new Microsoft fonts being distribute with Vista (some will be distributed with Office as well). All six of the new fonts are OpenType, and will provide much needed variety from the current popular Windows fonts.
- Font embedding in WPF: I haven’t had a chance to write a blog entry about this, but you can embed fonts into your WPF/Avalon application (even ones hosted in the browser). Many fonts provide licensing terms that allow you to freely embed and redistribute a font in an application (the WPF SDK will provide several free fonts from Ascender for this purpose).
Adrian proposes some solutions — but one thing he’s missing is reliable technology for font embedding in web browsers. IE has this feature but you don’t see it used much. Probably due to a combination of the following issues:
- Download size for quality fonts: Embedding a high-quality font can easily balloon a page size
- Lack of embeddable fonts: Not all fonts are licensed for embedding
- No cross-browser support: I’m not sure how much this was the issue, since many other IE-only features were adopted before they had cross-browser support
I’ll be speaking at Mix06 in Las Vegas this Monday — I’m giving a developer-focused overview of WPF (4:30 on Monday, if you’re interested).
One of the original goals (gimmicks?) for my talk was to not use Powerpoint — I didn’t want my talk to turn into a boring, slide-focused hour. I hoped that not having Powerpoint would force me to come up with a gripping, unique talk that would win many awards, honors, an Oscar, presidential medal of honor, and possibly a pony.
Well, after working on the talk for a few weeks, I’m removing this goal for a couple of reasons:
- Just like the PDC talks, the sessions at Mix will be recorded and archived on video. However, the chaptering is integrated with Powerpoint. Without slides, there will be no chaptering in my talk, making it very hard to scan later on.
- It’s silly. Plenty of great talks have been given with Powerpoint — and plenty of horrible talks have been given without it. Content, flow, and the speaker are what make or break a talk, not the file format.
Alternatively:
Don’t worry — I don’t think that slide will make the cut.
My talk was yesterday — thanks for all who attended.
I’ll be posting the applications I showed in the next post (my laptop is about to die).
If you took pictures during my session, I’d love to get a link / copy.
Sorry for the delay posting the materials from my Mix06 talk — I need to track down some licensing information for the fonts I used in one of my demos.
For those not at the talk, I had two main demos:
- Feature Montage: I created a set of interactive slides that showed off various portions of WPF feature areas. This is the part that I need to change slightly before posting.
- Thailand Browser Application: I built this demo live on stage. I’ve created some screencasts so you can watch this live (the first is posted, I’ll add links to the others in the next post).
In case you haven’t seen Mike Swanson’s announcement, the full Mix06 talks will be posted in the next couple of weeks.
I’ve recorded and posted screencasts for the demo-building portion of my Mix06 talk. It’s broken up into four parts:
- XamlPad: A quick, live introduction to XAML where I display some photos in a thumbnail view
- Visual Studio & Expression: I use Visual Studio and Expression to create the initial UI for the application
- Richer Typography: Adding a custom font to our application as well as page layout for the text
- Simple Video: Add video into the project and demonstrate code behind
I know everyone’s very excited to hear me stutter and sound silly over a PC microphone. Believe it or not, doing a screencast is harder than coding live on stage.
The total viewing time is just over 22 minutes (I’ll post a link to the combined video shortly). The application isn’t super-complex, but my goal during the talk was to give an overview and taste for the platform.
If there’s interest, I can expand upon the sample in order to make it more sophisticated.
If you have the Feb CTP installed, you can run the application via the browser:
You can download the source files, but note that I haven’t included the font (Lindsey) in the source as the licensing terms do not permit it. Lindsey will be available with the WPF SDK when we release.
Update: Here’s a link to the combined video — which is still a little too blurry look good. I’m trying to find a better hosting solution for the video.
Update: Get a higher-res, full length version of the video on Channel9