Web Font Specimen and A List Apart
Introducing Web Font Specimen, a handy (free) resource for web designers and typographers. So we can see how typefaces will look on the web. Announced today in an article I wrote to accompany the resource: Real Web Type in Real Web Context at A List Apart.
Also in ALA issue no. 296 is an excellent piece by Jason Santa Maria about choosing and combining typefaces: On Web Typography.
Thank you
Many thanks to Krista Stevens, Erin Lynch, Kevin Cornell, Jason Santa Maria, Jeffrey Zeldman, and everyone at A List Apart for making this issue happen.
Writing for A List Apart has been a goal of mine for years. It is incomparably fulfilling to have contributed to the publication by which all web industry publications are measured—the publication that helped foster the career I now enjoy. To the ALA staff, and authors past, my sincere thanks. Without you, I would not be me.
Thanks to my wife, baby daughter, family, friends, and coworkers for supporting me with kind words, patience, interest, love, and trust. Today’s achievements, made possible by years of learning and doing that often intruded on personal time, were not cheap. I owe you all more than I can repay.
Finally, thanks to everyone who follows, subscribes to, or otherwise pays attention to Nice Web Type. You keep on showing me you’re interested, so I keep on making.
Tim – I totally agree that quality is a critical, and an often misunderstood aspect to web fonts.
Might I suggest you revisit the font you chose for the body copy? It looks like poop in my browser.
Thanks Bill. Which site’s body copy are you looking at? What browser are you using?
Congratulations for your article on A List Apart, Tim! I really liked it, and I hope we can get some sort of standard for type rendering, it’s really frustrating seeing how much different type renders across the different OS and browsers. I liked Jason’s too, but I would have liked to see a few more examples of pairings.
Regarding the body copy, I think he refers to the one on Web Font Specimen. Unfortunately (and not surprisingly), it looks pretty bad on Windows (at least on Windows 7 + Firefox 3.6b2). Most of the times, when a typeface looks bad, it will be in Windows+Firefox :( At least on Windows 7, it looks pretty decent on the other browsers (IE8, Chrome, Opera 10 and Safari 4), but it may not be the case on Windows XP.
Thanks Gonzalo! Bill emailed me; it is indeed Win+FF that he’s using. I look forward to more conversation about type rendering.
Congrats, Tim. Hats off. A highly useful article.
Cheers, rich