Since my web skills have been rusting for more than 10 years, I was pleasantly surprised about the amount of options and the level of support in all major browsers for external fonts. Even self-hosting is little more than dropping in a single file or two into your web host’s file structure and adding a bit of CSS! I found this blog entry on opensource.com very helpful.

Concerning the actual fonts, that is a bit more tricky. Not so much because they are difficult to find though: even with the requirement of having an open font license, there is a ton of choice. A good starting point for me was another blog post on opensource.com. The challenge was more to find the “right” font that I like and that suits the blog. Here, my very general interest in fonts is quickly overwhelmed by the amount of variables: one font might look interesting in the headlines but produces flow text that is tiring to read. Another produces odd-looking results when rendering special characters common in various European languages such as ’ü’ or ’å’.

A very useful in my trial-and-error phase was the “Inspector” tool of Firefox (opened by right-clicking somewhere on the page and selecting “Inspect Element”). Any change to any font property is updated in real-time and allows to compare results easily. Even fonts with variable weights can be smoothly adjusted with a little slider widget!

Some really promising candidates I found at the league of moveable type who provide open, high-quality fonts in various formats. Not just that, they have a ton of material on typography including articles and even a podcast!

So for now I changed to Fanwood by Barry Schwartz.

Tags: blog