Webfonts, why hassle with ’em?

On our beloved web It used to be that if you wanted to have a cool custom font you would have to create a document in PhotoShop, save an image containing your text and add it to your site as an img tag. You might remember a time when fonts didn’t even matter because your site would be a ton of image slices generated by PhotoShop, Golive, or maybe you have been creating websites long enough to remember Adobe ImageReady!
Since those days things have evolved, next you might have used a transparent png file so you could have more options when it came to background color and what the text/image could be floating over.

But what is the present-day solution for fonts on the web?

You might use Photoshop and desire your code to look more like your mockup PSD, or you might be like me and design from the start in code, in which case you might have gone though a period of reling on basic webfonts, or you might have checked into a paid webfont service, or used Google Web Fonts and seen some the open source fonts which are now available.

All are great options, but what if you want something to look exactly how you want it to?

To get custom fonts on your site you can now use the @font-face property of CSS3, but will it work cross-browser?
Yes and No,
The fact of the matter is you can do it yourself,  but what about formats? There’s .woff, .ttf, .svg, eot, .ot, etc, which ones do you need? Will you remember to add the right fixes for IE?

Why waste your time when you can use ForntSquirrel!

Font Squirrel Webfont Generator

Simply upload the font you wish to use, in pretty much any format, and let the site do the rest. It will generate a zip archive with all of the files you need, including the font in various formats, and a css file containing the cross-browser compatible versions of @font-face.

Screen Shot 2013-05-15 at 10.35.10 PM
I usually copy the css out of the file it provides and add it to my current css file for the project, drop the font files in a folder called /font or /fonts, change the paths to the font files in the css to be correct for my application, and that’s it! You can just change the “font-family:” property of to what you want to call the font, and add it to whatever css selectors you wish to use it on, and you have your custom font ready to go, wherever you need it.

Screen Shot 2013-05-15 at 10.34.07 PM

I hope this helps you as much as it helped me, and lets you make better design decisions based on having more options!

-Alex