Web Fonts
January 14, 2011
Last year was a good year for typography on the Internet: several new standards were adopted that, in the long run, will give designers far greater control over how text appears on websites. Over at the FontFeed, there’re a couple of interviews up that discuss this, one with Yves Peters and the other with Stephen Coles. Peters and Coles are veteran typographers, and each has much valuable to say on recent developments in fonts on the web (Peters’ interview is less technical, and looks at web typography from a non-web designer’s standpoint, FWIW).
While MBP doesn’t dabble in web design (our site doesn’t even make use of web fonts; so it goes), the rapid development and deployment of typographic standards does suggest that the dismal state of typography in eBooks will soon be much improved. Licensing for the Babel-crowd of devices will take a lot of work—and likely a whole new class of distribution agreements and the concomitant legalese—but the speed with which real typographic options have come to the web makes serious typographic capabilities in tablets by the end of 2011 or the first half of 2012 a real possibility. Since MBP does dabble in attractively typeset books, real typography in eBooks (especially on 300+ DPI screens, imagine!) does concern us. Now, if only wireless could transmit hi-res photographs quickly and consistently, we could leave paper to the connoisseurs.
Head over to the FontFeed to read the interviews.
