Fonts, Flash and Freaking Comic Sans

Sep
12
2005

Essential Fonts For Designers - 300 fonts picked out as useful. Not 25,000 random fonts sorted alphabetically by obscure names. If you are using Comic Sans for anything, I beg you, please visit this site and find a replacement. Please. For the love of everything holy. Burn that font. Purge it. I've removed it from all of my systems, but it keeps coming back, keeps getting embedded in documents, keeps getting used in images, keeps burning it's grotesque visage into my retinas.

*SMACK*

Thanks, I needed that. I'm OK now.

Apparently recent versions of Windows actually include a font editor. PC Plus has an article covering how to launch it and use it. It's a little sketchy, but gets you started.

And, since one of the classic frustrations of font geeks who work on the web is having 100's of fonts on your workstation and being able to choose between 6 readily available in the browser, I think a couple of resources for actually using more fonts in sites are in order. I've mentioned sIFR as an aside before, but I think it deserves more
focus. It basically allows you to drop in alternative fonts for anyone with Flash installed. According to my web stats, that's 99% of you. In other words, using sIFR is more compatible than much of the AJAX stuff going on right now. At the moment, you need Flash to turn a TTF into a sIFR font, but there are sites starting to provide the sIFR fonts directly, alleviates that problem a bit.

sIFR itself
sIFR Demo
sIFR fonts
More sIFR fonts
An article on using sIFR

Posted in General, Other Programming |

 

Comments on this post

Feedback is always welcome. Read some from other folks or leave your own below. Just keep things civil and remember that what you post lives on in public. Forever.

Thanks,
J

One Response to “Fonts, Flash and Freaking Comic Sans”

  1. Beth Says:
    September 12th, 2005 at 11:53 am

    Funny you should mention Comic Sans…I had a client ask me to use it last week. Try politely explaining what a faux pas this is to someone.

Leave Your Own Comment

By submitting a comment, you agree to license it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

People who post comments get the added benefit of visiting the site without advertising.

© 2003-2008 J Wynia. All original content is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license unless otherwise noted. Content from other sources is licensed under its original terms.