font-face coming out of my ears

Something big is happening in the world. Well, in the world of web design at least.

font-face is a CSS3-ish feature that enables fonts to be embedded into a page. No longer will web pages be dominated in a Stalinesque manner by Arial, Times, Georgia and Verdana. Font liberation, you can have any font you want!!

Well, actually you can’t have any font, as font licenses can be quite restrictive about usage. Those clever folk over at Font Squirrel, a repository of fonts that can be used commercially, have delivered the most outrageously useful font-face service, which means you can embed any of these fonts by uploading them to your server and tweaking some CSS.

I’ve embedded my first font, and it really is pretty straightforward and satisfying.

I mentioned this to the resident crayon in my new offices in the cultural quarter of this quaint kentish town, and he asked if I had heard about the Google font directory? “No” was the short answer. “Wow” is the slightly longer answer: open source fonts. Not only are they available for all your font-face needs, they are also hosted by Google. So even less noodling on the font front.

How can football hold a candle to the sheer excitement of web design? I might have to sit down for the rest of the afternoon…

PS I forgot to mention the commercial venture that helped ignite the whole phenomenon, the font subscription service Typekit