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.

• A “bulletproof” method for using @font-face for embedding.
• A consideration of embedding from 2008
• A nice overview of the current situation from Jeffery Zeldman
• Free fonts available for embedding

Bling bling!

Now imagine going to Amazon or Ebay and instead of seeing a list of items you could spend money on you see a list of items that let you know how easy it would be to change someone’s life in a 3rd world country, that tell you for what you spent on your watch you could have bought two bags of rice that would have lasted a family for months. Imagine these online retailers actually lending a perspective on how opulent we are compared to our neighbors in need and how the ability to influence the world for the better really is within reach of the individual. Pretty cool huh? And this is just the beginning. The first phase of the web has been about the access of information – putting at our finger tips what previously only resided in libraries and as stories told among friends. I imagine that the second phase is going to be about processing that information – about using it in ways that the content creators never imagined and even in ways counter to their intended purpose, as might be the case with the Amazon and Ebay examples. And as those lenses mature in the digital space they’ll start to spill over into the physical space as well, shifting our perspectives on people and objects and all of the other interesting things we encounter every day, in real time. Suddenly walking a mile in another man’s shoes won’t be so hard and in fact might be as enlightening as the old adage would lead us to believe.