Opinions on using SVG instead of a font for body copy

[groundcontact]

Hi there!

I’m sure this can sound kind of crazy, but I’d like to know if anyone has experience (or opinions) with using SVG instead of a font for a website. I’m considering building a small marketplace site centered around the idea of crafts and hand-made experiences. For the landing page I believe it’s important to transmit the viewer this idea with every single visible detail, and text is one of the most prominent features of the site. I don’t want to use a sans or serif font since there’s no human touch on them. I’ve considered using a scrip font but, at least for me, most of them (if not all) have a phony look if you’re picky with these type of things. So, what I’ve though is to use real handwritten text. I could scan and use an image, but that would slow down the site and lead to responsive problems. So the other option is vectorizing the handwritten image to SVG. Any ideas?

[Atelierbram]

Don’t you think the (body-)text still needs to be selectable and accessible? I don’t think it’s worth it, at least for body copy; best is to settle on a web-font. Script fonts might as well be the easiest kind of fonts to create, so maybe you can have a go at it yourself. But because it is relatively easy to create there’s also a lot of them around. There only has to be one that you do like, no? For headings you could use some image-replacements technique, but I’m sure you are going to find out this is hard to maintain compared to the ease of using web-fonts, and will probably also not be worth it. But you could look into this SVG text replacement technique (with javaScript) which I tinkered with the other day.

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