Web Fonts Specimen!
Sans-serif
CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.
Many CSS properties, both old and new, deal with text: they describe text color, position, style, and direction. This is all very good—after all, text fills most of our screens. But in order for properties to reach their full potential, we need a good selection of fonts. And fonts are sorely missing from the web.
Consider the fine designs in the CSS Zen Garden. What makes them so exciting to look at? In part, it is the variety of fonts. Fonts convey design messages and create effect, and while in traditional print design there are a plethora of fonts available, fonts have been in limited supply on the web. Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again. A typical CSS Zen Garden design, on the other hand, uses a hand-picked font to render text and aligns the glyphs to a pixel-perfect degree...and then uses that text as a background image.
There are many reasons why background images should not be used to convey text. Images are expensive to transmit and hard to make. Imagine trying to translate a web page into 15 languages and having to produce a set of images for each language. Additionally, the quality of printed web pages suffers as images don’t scale to the resolutions offered by modern printers. Using background images is currently the only way designers can use their favorite fonts on the web. But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?
There is a way: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.
CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.
Many CSS properties, both old and new, deal with text: they describe text color, position, style, and direction. This is all very good—after all, text fills most of our screens. But in order for properties to reach their full potential, we need a good selection of fonts. And fonts are sorely missing from the web.
Consider the fine designs in the CSS Zen Garden. What makes them so exciting to look at? In part, it is the variety of fonts. Fonts convey design messages and create effect, and while in traditional print design there are a plethora of fonts available, fonts have been in limited supply on the web. Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again. A typical CSS Zen Garden design, on the other hand, uses a hand-picked font to render text and aligns the glyphs to a pixel-perfect degree...and then uses that text as a background image.
There are many reasons why background images should not be used to convey text. Images are expensive to transmit and hard to make. Imagine trying to translate a web page into 15 languages and having to produce a set of images for each language. Additionally, the quality of printed web pages suffers as images don’t scale to the resolutions offered by modern printers. Using background images is currently the only way designers can use their favorite fonts on the web. But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?
There is a way: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.
CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.
Many CSS properties, both old and new, deal with text: they describe text color, position, style, and direction. This is all very good—after all, text fills most of our screens. But in order for properties to reach their full potential, we need a good selection of fonts. And fonts are sorely missing from the web.
Consider the fine designs in the CSS Zen Garden. What makes them so exciting to look at? In part, it is the variety of fonts. Fonts convey design messages and create effect, and while in traditional print design there are a plethora of fonts available, fonts have been in limited supply on the web. Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again. A typical CSS Zen Garden design, on the other hand, uses a hand-picked font to render text and aligns the glyphs to a pixel-perfect degree...and then uses that text as a background image.
There are many reasons why background images should not be used to convey text. Images are expensive to transmit and hard to make. Imagine trying to translate a web page into 15 languages and having to produce a set of images for each language. Additionally, the quality of printed web pages suffers as images don’t scale to the resolutions offered by modern printers. Using background images is currently the only way designers can use their favorite fonts on the web. But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?
There is a way: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.
Serif
CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.
Many CSS properties, both old and new, deal with text: they describe text color, position, style, and direction. This is all very good—after all, text fills most of our screens. But in order for properties to reach their full potential, we need a good selection of fonts. And fonts are sorely missing from the web.
Consider the fine designs in the CSS Zen Garden. What makes them so exciting to look at? In part, it is the variety of fonts. Fonts convey design messages and create effect, and while in traditional print design there are a plethora of fonts available, fonts have been in limited supply on the web. Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again. A typical CSS Zen Garden design, on the other hand, uses a hand-picked font to render text and aligns the glyphs to a pixel-perfect degree...and then uses that text as a background image.
There are many reasons why background images should not be used to convey text. Images are expensive to transmit and hard to make. Imagine trying to translate a web page into 15 languages and having to produce a set of images for each language. Additionally, the quality of printed web pages suffers as images don’t scale to the resolutions offered by modern printers. Using background images is currently the only way designers can use their favorite fonts on the web. But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?
There is a way: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.
CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.
Many CSS properties, both old and new, deal with text: they describe text color, position, style, and direction. This is all very good—after all, text fills most of our screens. But in order for properties to reach their full potential, we need a good selection of fonts. And fonts are sorely missing from the web.
Consider the fine designs in the CSS Zen Garden. What makes them so exciting to look at? In part, it is the variety of fonts. Fonts convey design messages and create effect, and while in traditional print design there are a plethora of fonts available, fonts have been in limited supply on the web. Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again. A typical CSS Zen Garden design, on the other hand, uses a hand-picked font to render text and aligns the glyphs to a pixel-perfect degree...and then uses that text as a background image.
There are many reasons why background images should not be used to convey text. Images are expensive to transmit and hard to make. Imagine trying to translate a web page into 15 languages and having to produce a set of images for each language. Additionally, the quality of printed web pages suffers as images don’t scale to the resolutions offered by modern printers. Using background images is currently the only way designers can use their favorite fonts on the web. But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?
There is a way: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.
Monospaced (aka Fixed-width)
CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.
Many CSS properties, both old and new, deal with text: they describe text color, position, style, and direction. This is all very good—after all, text fills most of our screens. But in order for properties to reach their full potential, we need a good selection of fonts. And fonts are sorely missing from the web.
Consider the fine designs in the CSS Zen Garden. What makes them so exciting to look at? In part, it is the variety of fonts. Fonts convey design messages and create effect, and while in traditional print design there are a plethora of fonts available, fonts have been in limited supply on the web. Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again. A typical CSS Zen Garden design, on the other hand, uses a hand-picked font to render text and aligns the glyphs to a pixel-perfect degree...and then uses that text as a background image.
There are many reasons why background images should not be used to convey text. Images are expensive to transmit and hard to make. Imagine trying to translate a web page into 15 languages and having to produce a set of images for each language. Additionally, the quality of printed web pages suffers as images don’t scale to the resolutions offered by modern printers. Using background images is currently the only way designers can use their favorite fonts on the web. But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?
There is a way: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.