The Web and Typography

Posted 07 August 2009

In Industry, Branding and Design

Typography is an essential tool for any designer to emphasise and support their design. The different options we have available as web developers have slowly grown and as browser support continues to improve the future of typography looks promising. The use of fonts on the web was originally limited to a pre-defined set of legible and useful fonts. Through the first years of the Internet this was acceptable and for the audience, appropriate. When the internet inevitably reached a commercial and wide-spread audience, marketing took over and the existing fonts didn't exactly lend themselves to inspirational or enticing designs. At the time the sensible method was to use images. Although this provided a solution for static areas of a page, dynamic content went largely untouched. As dynamic sites rightly became the norm, designers struggled to manipulate the available fonts into the designs they imagined. The early 2000's, in our opinion, saw a plateau reached with designs made up of elaborate headers and footers with dynamic content remaining relatively similiar to that of the past decade. With the development and wide spread adoption of Flash an accessible and scalable technique was developed. Shaun Inman's initial development of sIFR created a technique allowing designers to use whatever font they wanted. Although the initial versions were notoriously difficult to configure they did gain enough positive reaction to warrant further development which Mike Davidson and now Mark Wubben have ably continued. Following the release of sIFR 3 as a stable beta and as the ease of development has substantially increased our designers get more ambitious with their use of non-standard fonts. sIFR provides the opportunity to develop sites which are visual appealing and effective marketing tools for our clients. Why not view some examples of our work or get in touch to see what TJS can do for you.