Tuesday, June 06, 2006

HTML: Use more than Arial and Times New Roman

To the designer, it's a pain only using Arial and Times New Roman for headlines (well, the MacHead designers are probably using Helvetica and Times, but I regress. . .) , so one uses images. The problem is that images are static unless you have an image generation script package installed on your web server to create images on-the-fly.

So what's one to do?

A friend of mine actually sent me a link to Mike Davidson's site on sIFR 2.0 (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) two years ago. I had forgotten about it until my creative director wanted a headline in a pixel font in a database driven site.

The concept

sIFR can replace short amounts of text with text rendered in the typeface you choose--whether or not your users have the font installed on their computer. A flash movie is created on the client side and uses JavaScript to pass text to it from the HTML (that's correct, no coding the text twice). That means with a few lines of Javascript, you can use any fancy font you want for headlines and pullout quotes.


--Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com

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