Font-ing my new coolness
As a writer, font fondling annoys the heck out of me. Give me a Helvetica, or Lucinda, or Times New Roman, or even Courier. That’s what I started out with (okay, not Helvetica) on my typewriters back in the day.
If I needed emphasis, I used character symbols or swapped out the daisy wheel on my Brother typewriter, or, as is now taboo in interwebby land, USED CAPITAL LETTERS or Cap Typing To Make My Point.
But only when necessary. I let my writing speak for itself (including one story I wrote as a tween that started nearly every word with the letter “T”).
As a designer, I was all about the Cool FontingTM. I drew my own letters (badly) and stripped them down to the barest pixels possible at web time, but back in the bad old days of dial-up download, that was a pretty slow solution, too. And I’m not a fantastic graphic artist, so things were even worse.
Putting a specialized font on a website was a bad idea, too – there was no way to fall back if a browser couldn’t handle it. But now? When web pages can or should be more artsy and you don’t want to force someone into frames or Flash? Enter TypeKit. It looks as though I’ll be able to pretty up my non-bland blog (this one is plain on purpose and won’t change) with fancy fonts that help convey the feeling and look I want to express. And people with a slower connection or older browser can skip it.
Although, being the grump I am, I do worry that this will turn the rest of the web into MySpace – so I hope, unlike some of the latest iPhone features, I can at least have the option to turn it off. Maybe I’ll build a greasemonkey app called “Turn off the Stupid”.