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  • #42939
    PicnicTutorials
    Participant

    My recent thread has made me think. I would like to use a custom font in my new site. I have always just used the plain safe type faces like Ariel and likes. I see google fonts. But have seen some bad mouth it. So what is the best way to insert custom font without affecting my page speed that much. Because currently my page speed rocks. Thanks for your pointers.

    #125831
    dfogge
    Participant

    most of the badmouthing aimed at google fonts stems from the shoddy quality you find there. typekit, which isn’t free, has much more high-end fonts.

    here’s a tutorial on loading google web fonts quickly: http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2010/09/optimizing-use-of-google-font-api.html

    #125832
    PicnicTutorials
    Participant

    Additionally, I don’t need them to work in ie. only degrade well.

    #125833
    PicnicTutorials
    Participant
    #125834
    dfogge
    Participant

    font squirrel is cool, i used to use it, but make sure you’re legally allowed to use the fonts you submit to it.

    i’m not exactly sure if loading fonts from your own server is faster than loading from a font hosting service, though.

    #125837
    PicnicTutorials
    Participant

    Gaaaauuuud. Tuts out there freaking blow. Just tell me how to do it. DON’T MAKE ME WADE THROUGH ALL YOUR LIFE STORRIES TO FIND THE CODE.

    Every time there is more than one or two short paragraphs I click the back button.

    Even worse are the ones that hide the demo in a mirrad of links. Almost trying to force you to read there ego blown shit in order to find the demo.

    Or maybe I just had too much coffee today.

    #125845
    Andy Howells
    Participant

    @websitecodetutorials – Yeah fuck those bloggers with their free knowledge sharing! What egomaniacal pricks, sharing information, giving you explanations, how dare they! /sarcasm

    #125848
    chrisburton
    Participant

    Not all of Google’s webfonts are bad. I’ll even admit that and I’m probably their biggest critic on this forum. In fact, I am serving one they offer on my own site (but not through them). There are other reasons why I don’t use their service but I’m not going to get into that right now.

    I believe that not just designers but developers should also care about the quality of rendering that webfonts output. If you take the time to test on multiple platforms for your layout, you should do the same for webfonts.

    If I could recommend any webfont distributor it would have to be Webtype. Not only for quality but they really want your business so they do everything they can to accommodate you. Such as, I wanted to use Benton Modern RE regular and Benton RE italic styles but their license only offered 10,000 page views per month for $20 per style. That’s actually a pretty good package. However, at this point that’s even too large for my personal site at the moment while in development. I contacted them and they allowed me to do 5,000 page views per month for $15 per style. So to show my appreciation for working with me, I offered to throw in Benton Sans as well. It ended up working out perfectly since I needed a sans-serif too. Can you see Typekit doing that (don’t ask them, I ‘ve already tried)? Don’t get me wrong, I love Typekit, I’ve used them for a long long time but they’re not as flexible.

    Font Squirrel is pretty good. They optimize their library just as Typekit does so I would recommend their service. I might actually switch to them from Typekit to serve a specific webfont on my own server. Anyway, I’m ranting.

    I ❤ type

    #125849
    chrisburton
    Participant

    And to answer your question, what do you mean by “custom font”?

    #125858
    PicnicTutorials
    Participant

    Here is a very good round up of all the top font providers. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/20/review-of-popular-web-font-embedding-services/. I’m only using free so it looks like google font s it is.

    #125861
    PicnicTutorials
    Participant

    Google has 600+ fonts. Unless I’m missing something that seems more than adequate for any project.

    #125864
    PicnicTutorials
    Participant

    Actually @font-face it is. Much better in my eyes. http://sixrevisions.com/css/font-face-guide/

    #125871
    dfogge
    Participant

    “Every time there is more than one or two short paragraphs I click the back button.”

    Hey nice attitude! :wtf:

    #125895
    Kitty Giraudel
    Participant

    > Yeah fuck those bloggers with their free knowledge sharing! What egomaniacal pricks, sharing information, giving you explanations, how dare they! /sarcasm

    Seconded. Some people write and share knowledge. If you don’t want to read, don’t read but don’t blame on them. You’re the lazy person.

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