I would like to know if I should create CSS buttons or image buttons for my site. What is better? The problem is that the text is formatted with Helvetica Neue (I like that font very much) and I can’t use it as a web font because of copyright issues.
If I create the buttons in CSS they look beautiful in the browser but get resized when the user has chosen a different text-size for their browsers.
Image buttons have the advantage I can embed my font but do not look that good as CSS buttons. Also in that case I had to make Retina-versions for the buttons (just for the future when any PC has a Retina-display).
Is there a web-safe alternative to Helvetica Neue? Should I disable the resizing of my button div-containers? What’s today’s standard when it comes to website buttons?
Helvetica Neue can in fact be licensed as a web font:
http://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/neue-helvetica?QueryFontType=Web#product_top
I would personally stay very far away from image buttons (for the reasons you yourself outlined), and would rather fall back to a similar font (e.g. Arimo on Google Web Fonts) than have to worry about generating (and re-generating) a bunch of images.