The Battle Of Fonts, and the Future of Typography
For what has seemed to be the longest time, I had no care for fonts. Words were words, and nobody cared about how they were spaced or whether there were orphans or not.
Then I came across two magazines: one with incredible text, and one with the most ugliest layout I had ever seen. And by the layout, I mean the typography: ligatures weren’t used, line height was horrible… from that point on, I realized the importance of typography.
What is so incredibly fun about checking text for orphans and widows, I do not know. Either way, typography became a sort of passion for me. To this date, I know countless names of fonts and I can recognize them on sight. I know the ever-so-small difference between Arial and Helvetica. And I have noticed.
Why ordinary people detest type, I do not know. But every single time my teacher comes by to pick up yet another essay and I take a look at it, seeing worlds of Papyrus and Times New Roman… it grosses me out, quite frankly.
You have people in my class who don’t bother, who use Times New Roman as default. And if you think that’s bad, then you haven’t seen anything. Because the other people use the most erratic things possible: think pink Comic Sans MS.
And then there’s me: Adobe Garamond Pro loving, taking time to properly kern my essays, lay them out properly, use small caps instead of CAPS. The difference is amazing, people.
Recently, I decided to dish out Cufon to both portfolio sites and my literature blog as headings. I would have preferred a more solid method (say, @font-face), but support for @font-face isn’t high enough yet.
Cufon only works for headers. The same applies for sIFR. This is because they are all replacing text: that is, either replacing them with blocks of Flash (in sIFR’s case) or replacing them with images using JavaScript (in Cufon’s case).
Cufon works great right now. There’s a small pause between load and transformation, but that’s okay. What really makes the difference is that it looks so much better. I only wished that I could replace blocks of text without having a visible toll on the client computer.
These are things to hope for. But until then, we’ll all be stuck using Arial and Times. It makes me wonder what the future of typography is when the latest age of people still use Times New Roman.