Just a few beautiful, well-crafted fonts for headings and body text that you probably haven’t spotted before. Free for personal and commercial use. Enjoy!
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Web fonts are often terrible for web performance and none of the font loading strategies are particularly effective to address that. If you want to use web fonts your choices are basically Flash of Invisible Text (aka FOIT) or Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT). Neither option has really “won out” because neither is really satisfactory, to be honest. Upcoming font options may finally deliver on the promise of making it easier to align fallback fonts to the final fonts.
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If you’re looking for a useful free font with a bit of an edge, look no further than this collection of modern typefaces. These sleek and versatile fonts are perfect for all sorts of designs, from websites to printed material, and they are all completely free for both personal and commercial use. To facilitate your font picking and pairing process, Noemi Stauffer included examples of how these typefaces have been put to use recently, as well as a few pairing ideas. Enjoy!
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Like all good things, Google Fonts do come with a cost. Each font carries a weight that the web browser needs to download before they can be displayed. Google Fonts are easy to implement, but they can have a big impact on your page load times. With the correct setup, the additional load time isn’t noticeable. However, get it wrong and your users could be waiting up to a few seconds before any text is displayed. In this article, Danny Cooper will explore how we can load them in the most optimal way.
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Are you considering transforming old cursive handwriting into a modern digital font? Before forging ahead with the design, assess your goals for historical accuracy, identify the idiosyncrasies that make the handwriting special, develop a strategy for connecting glyphs, and decide if you want to include texture. One of the biggest decisions you will need to make is whether you want to capture every nuance of your handwriting specimen, or if you want to design something inspired by that handwriting. Today, Carolyn Porter will help you with that. Let the fun begin!
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How can we design in a way to help visitors rather than frustrate them? How do we know that a great user experience is really working well? In this pairing of videos from 2018 SmashingConfs, we think about UX — from two very different angles.
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With so much going on in the web industry, it can be difficult catching up with everything — especially with font loading and webfonts that greatly affect web performance. Search no further — we’ve got your back.
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In terms of how to handle typography in mobile web design, it appears that simpler and safer works best. In this article, Suzanne Scacca will break down the elements you need to pay attention to in mobile typography and then visit what the research says about how to handle them. She will give you a brief summary of what it is we know about typography in web design, and then see what UX experts and tests have been able to reveal about using typography for mobile.
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Windows, macOS and Linux made up font-wise, and since then, all modern fonts have been compatible across those OS’. There’s no question, the future of web typography looks promising. At the 2016 ATypI conference, the world’s biggest type design conference, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Adobe announced that they have been working on a new iteration of the OpenType standard, called variable fonts. Because it gives a lot more control to the user to modify the typeface depending on the context and device, this new version opens new opportunities for web typography and will close the gap in quality between web and print. In this article, François Poizat will show you the ins and outs of these new tools and how to take control of our typography.
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Typefaces are always telling us something. We receive information through typography. Type influences us, adds coloring to words, sets a mood and atmosphere, assists, teaches, scares us, brings us joy and inspires us. The contemporary world has its own rhythm, aesthetic and philosophy; while we are changing, everything is changing around us. In studying historical lettering in calligraphy, we can understand the character and potential of a writing instrument, and, as a result, we can manage its expressive means.
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