Last week at the Voices that Matter Web Design conference in San Francisco, I unveiled the latest incarnation of the Web Safe Fonts list during my presentation “Many Types, Many Faces: Web Typography Beyond Arial and Times and Georgia.” I created the first beta version of the list over a year ago to show all of the fonts that are likely to be pre-installed on Mac and Windows computers, with a rough rating of the likely hood a given font is installed based on the source of the install.

The Web Safe Fonts list has gotten some attention, but I’ve held off really promoting it until I got some basic functionality in place. With that done, I’m ready to launch Web Safe Fonts-Beta 2 which now includes:

• Column Sort: Organize fonts by name, available weights and styles, OS, and install likely hood.
• Graphic Samples: A screen capture of the full alpha-numeric glyph set for the given font. There are still a couple of samples missing, but I should have those in place soon. Thanks to Mauro Scappa at MediaBarn for help with the Windows screenshot.
• Other refinements: The list is now in an array to allow sorting and I separated the OS and rank into separated columns.

At the conference, I was not able to only talk about the list, but got some great feedback and ideas for some new features I need to include, as well as some great news about a new project. I can’t say much about it right now, but I hope to make an announcement soon.

I’m by no means finished with the list, and hope to make more improvements as time allows including:

• List Unix fonts.
• Add Generic font-family names. This can be problematic since there are no hard and fast rules, but I’m working on it.
• Add Lorem Ipsum and font-family list features. This will allow visitors to create a custom list of fonts they want to use and preview all of them in Greek text.
• Add notes on font legibility and size constraints.
• Continue to vet list for accuracy.

If you are using the list and/or have any feedback, please let me know.

Tags: Conferences, Typography, Web Design by jason
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Ok, first a few prezzys for you. If you haven’t already seen them, check out my list of Web Safe Fonts. These are fonts that are likely to be installed on Windows or Mac machines (or even both) and can be used by Web designers to vastly improve their typographic choices.

The second gift is a newish Firefox add-on that allows you to quickly snap full page screenshots of any Web page. I like this one even over my old stand-by, Paparazzi, because I can take my picture after interacting with the page.

Now for the kick-back. I’m trying to gather graphic font-samples of all of the Web Safe fonts, but I do not have access to a PC running Microsoft Office 2007. I have all of the Mac and cross-platform fonts, but not the ones specific to the Window’s version of Office. I need to get a screen capture of all of these fonts, so that designers can see what they are supposed to look like to make better Web designs.

Can you help a guy out?

Just install the Firefox add-on, point your browser at www.speaking-in-styles.com/web-typography/Web-Safe-Fonts/, snap a shot o the full page (preferably with font- anti-aliasing turned on so it doesn’t look like a pig’s ear) and email me the PNG or JPEG image: jason (a) brighteyemedia.com.

That’s it. It’s that simple.

The first person to send me a complete list of Windows Microsoft Office 2007 fonts will receive my undying gratitude, credit in the list, and a big thanks you in my forth-coming book Speaking In Styles.

Tags: Internet, Typography, Web Design by jason
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At the recent Voices that Matter conference, I had the privilege of having dinner with Bill Cullifer, the Executive Director of WOW (World Organization of Webmasters). I hadn’t check in with that group in a while (they’ve been around since 1996), so I was excited to hear about a lot of the great stuff the are doing to help educate Web professionals, including conferences, and “Iron Chef” student competition, and certification. Bill invited me to be interviewed for the WOW Technology Minute, and we talked about Web Typography.

Check it my interview on the WOW Technology Minute Web site.

Tags: Conferences, Typography by jason
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Web typography is pretty much synonymous with limitations. Limited controls, limited styles, but, most importantly, limited font-family choices. The first two limitations can only be overcome through changes in the browsers, however, there are a surprisingly large number of fonts to choose from, if you are willing to work with a more fluid typography.Most designers are familiar with the 11 “Core Web Fonts” that are industry standards. Primarily, we will use Arial (or Helvetica), Times New Roman (or just Times), and Georgia, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years. You will occasionally see Verdana and Trebuchet MS tried, but these are not the most elegant looking of fonts. We use these fonts because we know that they are pre-installed on most computers. Yet most computers will also have many other fonts pre-installed on them, either by the operating system or by specific applications.

I have created a list of “Web Safe Fonts” showing fonts pre-installed on Windows and Mac as well as fonts installed by iLife on the Mac (which is standard on all Macs) and Microsoft Office for both Mac and PC. Although not all of these fonts will be of general use, it does balloon the list of reliable fonts from 11 to around 200. To make selection easier, I have also indicated which OS the font is pre-installed for, ranked each font on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 for fonts certain to be installed and 5 for fonts unlikely to be installed), and the source of the fonts instillation.When choosing fonts to use, in your font-family list, keep these points in mind:

• Test the different fonts in different combinations.
• For headline copy, use fonts with similar widths and kerning.
• For body copy, select fonts with bold, italic, and bold/italic versions.
• If you download a font or use a Web Safe Font, always include a Core Web Font and generic font-family as back-ups.

View the Web Safe Fonts >>

Tags: Typography by jason
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Next June (sometime between June 10th and June 13th to be more precise) I will be presenting a session on Web Typography at the Voices the Matter Conference to be held in Nashville, TN. The conference, run by the book publisher New Riders, brings together some of their top authors for a four day lovefest of everything Web design.

This is my first time at the conference (of course, this is only the second VTM conference) but it looks pretty exciting, with some authors I know well and others I’m looking forward to meeting.If you want to attend, you can register before May 2nd and save $200 and (just because I’m a sweet guy) you can use my special promo code at ANY time to save another $200. Use the priority code WDDSPKR during registration to save $200 on any of the packages.I hope to see you there.

Tags: Conferences, Typography by jason
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