Calgary Web Designer Jenn Armour | Info Architecture + User Centric Web Design + Online Marketing + Social Media + Ideas

Cufon – making the web designer’s life less font limited

// September 11th, 2009 // Design, Ramblings

If you haven’t been informed of “Cufon – fonts for the people” yet you are missing out on big joy. Essentially Cufon is a font generator that provides an easy way for web builders and developers to utilize any TTF or OTF fonts in their web builds.

It is fast rendering in web sites, uses canvas and VML, doesn’t use flash, and uses no images. The result is beatifully rendered fonts which is entirely refreshing in web layouts and design. Anyone else sick of a web littered with the poor use of arial, verdana, or georgia?

The choice of fonts and the way they are handled is one of the most important aspects of communication design. Typefaces talk. Print designer’s have known for a long time that typology, carefully chosen and used in order to communicate a certain message is the key to successful design.

The web designer’s hands have been tied when it came to font choices. This has always been a disappointment to me. When Sifr was developed the sun shone a bit brighter. It was a bit of a pain to get things working. Yet it was appreciated by the web design community for sure! It is a flash rendering engine for fonts. So the end result to an average web veiwer is the same – wow not the same old boring fonts. Similarly, search engines could read the little flash files as text making for good optimization.

Cufon, however, is much more friendly to use – no flash needed. Simply grab your TTF or OTF font files, run them through the Cufon generator, and insert the Cufon replace or set tags in header. It is very easy and clean. Thank you Cufon.