It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
I don't think this is an epidemic or anything, but I've seen it done a few times and even advocated for. This is what I mean...… Read article “Don’t just copy the @font-face out of Google Fonts URLs”
“Typography on the web is in single color: characters are either black or red, never black and red …Then emoji hit the scene, became part of Unicode, and therefore could be expressed by characters — or “glyphs” in font terminology. The smiley, levitating businessman and the infamous pile of poo became true siblings to letters, numbers and punctuation marks.”
Using emojis in code is easy. Head over to emojipedia and copy and paste one in.… Read article “It All Started With Emoji: Color Typography on the Web”
Roel Nieskens released a tool that lets you upload a font file and see what’s inside, from how many characters it contains to the number of languages it supports. Here’s what you see once you upload a font, in this case Covik Sans Mono Black:
Why is this data useful? Well, I used this tool just the other day when I found a font file in a random Dropbox folder. What OpenType features does this font have? Are there any … Read article “Wakamai Fondue”
There’s a lot of good news in the world of web fonts!
unicode-range, the last modern browser to do so.font-display are landing in Safari and Firefox.Using custom fonts in a performant way is becoming far easier. Let’s take a peek at some things we can do when using custom fonts to make sure we’re being as performant as we can be.… Read article “Three Techniques for Performant Custom Font Usage”
Using custom fonts is getting increasingly easier. We’ll cover the basics of usage here and get into the more in-depth features that are helpful for developers who want to level up and aim to perfect advanced concepts, like loading font files.
System font stacks got hot about a year ago, no doubt influenced by Mark Otto's work putting them live on GitHub.
The why, to me, feels like (1) yay performance and (2) the site looks like the rest of the operating system. But to Mark:
… Read article “Shipping system fonts to GitHub.com”Helvetica was created in 1957 when the personal computer was a pipe dream. Arial was created in 1982 and is available on 95% of computers across the web. Millions, if not billions, of web
There is a great bit in here where Glen uses Font Style Matcher to create some CSS for a fallback font that has font-size, line-height, font-weight, letter-spacing, and word-spacing adjusted so perfectly that when the web font does load, the page hardly shifts at all. Like barely noticeable FOUT. Maybe we'll call it FOCST (Flash of Carefully Styled Text).… Read article “Crafting Webfont Fallbacks”
The font-display property defines how font files are loaded and displayed by the browser. It is applied to the @font-face rule which defines custom fonts in a stylesheet.
@font-face {
font-family: 'MyWebFont'; /* Define the custom font name */
src: url('myfont.woff2') format('woff2'),
url('myfont.woff') format('woff'); /* Define where the font can be downloaded */
font-display: fallback; /* Define how the browser behaves during download */
}Time for another pairing screencast! This time I have Zach Leatherman on, from Filament Group. Zach has done a lot of research, writing, and speaking about web font loading the past few years. He's got a comprehensive guide on it!
There are some problems with the default way that custom fonts are loaded. As in, just linking up a font in some CSS through @font-face. Even the way Google Fonts provides you to use their fonts Zach calls … Read article “#152: Font Loading with Zach Leatherman”