A modification, even slight, in the way your site or your blog uses typography can go a long way to increasing its aesthetic appeal. Fortunately, there are a few tools out there that can easily allow you to do just that.
Typeface.js, the open-source javascript library, accomplishes the above task by allowing you to embed custom fonts in your design. This basically means that you’ll no longer be limited to Arial, Times New Roman, or other boring fonts for your site’s headings or titles.
"Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally. This is a work in progress, but functional enough at least to render the the graphic text on this site."
There have been other tools to accomplish this overall functionality. Two examples of which are sIFR and Facelift Image Replacement. The former seems to require, as best as I can recall from my own personal experience, various levels of tweaking in order to get it to work perfectly. The latter, FLIR, doesn’t actually display the custom font as text. Instead, the dynamic solution uses PHP to replace your headers or titles with images on-the-fly.
For some examples of how Typeface.js looks, some sample fonts to try out on your own or for an online font conversion tool (for use with your existing TrueType fonts), check out the Typeface.js official site at typeface.neocracy.org.
(If your existing font of preference isn’t TrueType, you can use the open-source tool "FontForge" to convert it.)
Have you had good/bad experiences with Typeface.js? Let us and other readers know by dropping a comment below.
