Google Web Fonts
Google have decided to go in to the web font business (why not, they're into everything else), and last week released their own web font API. The actual API (Application Programming Interface) may only be of interest to web developers, but the wider issue of web fonts and implementing non web-safe standard fonts is in my mind one of the most important issues for web design today.
Most web sites still use the standard "font families" for websites. These are fonts that web designers know are guaranteed to be installed on a users web browser.
Web browsers do have the ability to utilise other fonts, however the designer can not know which fonts a user has installed on their system. If a designer decidesd to use a "non-standard" font, which the user does not have installed then it is substituted with a similar type of font that the user does have installed. This font substitution kills any thought of styling a website with a specific font typeface. So what we are left with is the same boring old web safe fontssuch as Arial, Georgie, Times New Roman etc.
Web developers have come up with several clever solutions to this problem, and solutions such as sIFR and Cufon, both of which I have used in commerical websites, which use Flash or JavaScript to dynamically replace your standard CSS styles with your chosen custom font. These solutions are not perfect, and are not toally accessible relying on users to have JavaScript of Flash installed. There are also performance issue if you have a text heavy website that makes use of a large amount of custom styled text within your site.
At the time of writing this article Google have launched their Font API with a limited set of fonts (see here), but I am sure with Google behind it, more designers will be contributing.
I will be looking at the Google Font API over the coming weeks as an alternative to my current preferred solution of using Cufon. At first glance, it does does seem easy to implement ,and I am sure it will be another tool in my quest for the perfect web font solution!