Good advice all around in the posts above. A site I've found to be pretty insightful is Rands in Repose. He's also a new book titled "Managing Humans".
Check it out—I'm a fan.
You're absolutely right -- one of the biggest weaknesses in web design is user-font dependence. But the situation is really quite a bit more complicated than simply throwing a font into a directory and linking to it. Now, once the issue was settled, that's exactly how it should work. Getting to that point is quite a bit more difficult though.
Most people get by with whatever is the default on their OS, never looking to see what else is out there. But lo and behold, if you did a little bit of looking, you'd find some exquisite examples of typeface design. You'd also find that they can cost a fair bit of money, generally in the $50-$100 range. And what do you get for that money, a 100KB file maybe? In a world where people regularly toss about pirated copy of movies in the GB range, what's to stop people from just emailing that typeface to everyone in their address list? Or better yet, post it on their website to make it available to the world at large?
How much work and effort goes into tweaking a typeface to get it just so? Does it take a week? A year? 25 years?
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Good advice all around in the posts above. A site I've found to be pretty insightful is Rands in Repose. He's also a new book titled "Managing Humans". Check it out—I'm a fan.
You're absolutely right -- one of the biggest weaknesses in web design is user-font dependence. But the situation is really quite a bit more complicated than simply throwing a font into a directory and linking to it. Now, once the issue was settled, that's exactly how it should work. Getting to that point is quite a bit more difficult though.
Most people get by with whatever is the default on their OS, never looking to see what else is out there. But lo and behold, if you did a little bit of looking, you'd find some exquisite examples of typeface design. You'd also find that they can cost a fair bit of money, generally in the $50-$100 range. And what do you get for that money, a 100KB file maybe? In a world where people regularly toss about pirated copy of movies in the GB range, what's to stop people from just emailing that typeface to everyone in their address list? Or better yet, post it on their website to make it available to the world at large?
How much work and effort goes into tweaking a typeface to get it just so? Does it take a week? A year? 25 years?
Here's a pretty good discussion on the nuances involved: Typeblography: Fonts on the Web