Question

I’ve heard of Google Fonts and Typekit. I’m looking for preferences before I read into all the pros and cons of each.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a great solution for small bits of text like headers or usernames, page titles, etc. You need to create SWF files with your preferred fonts embedded into the movies. Each variation of your font needs to be its own Flash movie.

The downside of sIFR is that the setup is somewhat time consuming, you need Flash, and it hasn’t been touched since 2005.

Google Web Fonts is in its infancy and is very hit or miss in terms of quality of the font rendering on the screen. For example it looks amazing on Unix in Safari and looks awful on Windows in IE (go figure, right?). It also only provides a handful of fonts; many of which are in-between what you need and what you don’t need – ie, “techy but not THAT techy please”.

Cufon is a free service in which you upload your own font files and their site generates a javascript file which you include in your site. The script will look for various css classes you add to your DOM elements and swap on the fly.

Typekit is a similar service to Cufon but also provides you access to thousands of fonts and is subscription-based. The main benefit is you don’t have to worry about any licensing mishaps you might encounter with Cufon.

My recommendation is Cufon if you make sure to follow their licensing agreements and don’t go embedding fonts you obtained through a torrent or something stupid.