Change is afoot on the web, with HTML 5 around the corner and everyone freaking out about how it and the standards it leverages and creates will solidify. The whole thing reminds me of the first time I mixed up hydraulic cement. “Oh my gosh this is totally… I NEED MORE WATER! Quick! It’s going to… I… can’t… AH just put it in there!” Luckily the web isn’t the cement I used to plug up the hole in a brick wall that flooded my bedroom every time it rained – it’s a slow moving beast that’s guided not by kings of rule and flippant decisions (at least hopefully those are behind us) but rather committees and volunteers and a whole bunch of other thankless positions. And corporations. Okay, but lets gloss over those for the moment and assume we’re all mutually invested in this whole “progress” thing working out.
So this weekend I took another look at @font-face embedding after having let it sit for a year or so. When it was first announced we all, all of us designers, looked up from our Helvetica and Arial stupor like a stoned kid who’s just been told there’s free pizza down in the dorm lobby. “Huh? Wait, were you talking to me? There’s… woah free pizza? Alright!” and suddenly the haze lifted and we were in motion, that is until we read the fine print of “limited support across browsers” and realized we had to sign up for a credit card or calling card or some other sort of promo to get that pizza. Bummer. But here we all, almost all grow’d up and it’s starting to look halfway practical to use a custom font on the web via CSS, given due concern for embedding and licensing restrictions. What follows are a few resources regarding that concern and hopefully, by using @font-face in our own pages, we’ll slowly influence that beast of the web.