April 2012
1 post
In the Showcase: Gradient Press, Svilen...
Here’s another collection of stunning sites from the Fontdeck showcase.
Here’s a great use of Din Display on this website promoting a book about unicycling by Gradient Press. In addition to the cool parallax scrolling effect, Din’s solid lines and precise angles are perfect for this context.
This site for Bulgarian photographer utilises the beautiful Bliss Cyrillic for...
March 2012
1 post
5 tags
In the Showcase: Smashing Magazine, Avios &...
Here’s another round up of gorgeous new websites from the Fontdeck showcase.
Smashing Magazine, the world’s most popular online web design magazine, was recently responsively redesigned by Elliot Jay Stocks. With a focus on simple, readable typography, the design features the stylish and highly legible pairing of Skolar and Proxima Nova.
Avios (the new Airmiles service) also...
February 2012
1 post
3 tags
Typejockeys are up and running!
Our latest foundry partner, Typejockeys, is based in Vienna, Austria and was established in 2008 by Anna Fahrmaier, Thomas Gabriel and Michael Hochleitner. It currently boasts three fabulous typefaces, Aniuk, Premiéra and Ingeborg.
Aniuk
Aniuk has been designed to be used in large sizes, boasting five robust weights of Regular, Medium, Bold, Heavy and Black. Aniuk is playful with...
January 2012
2 posts
5 tags
Using OpenType font features with CSS 3: Part 1
The vast majority of fonts contain lowercase and uppercase alphabets, numerals, punctuation and accents. But there can be much more to fonts than this basic set of characters. Many professionally-designed fonts also contain ligatures, alternative characters, smallcaps, different kinds of numbers, and sometimes much more besides.
Discretionary ligatures in Magneta · Stylistic alternate in...
1 tag
24 Fab Fonts as Featured in the Adfont Calendar
.advent-post {
width: 100%;
overflow: hidden;
margin-bottom: 2em;
}
.advent-post li {
background-color: #EAEAEA;
display: inline;
float: left;
margin-right: 1%;
margin-bottom: 20px;
padding: 10px 1% 0;
width: 30%;
margin-top: 10px;
position: relative;
}
.advent-post .font-image {
width: 100%;
-webkit-box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px 0px;
-moz-box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px 0px;
box-shadow: 1px...
December 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Xmas presents for type fans
A massive Christmas list of fabulous gifts for the type geek, letter lover or font fan in your life.
Typographic Time Zone Clocks by Goodwin and Goodwin. £54.95. Made in England out of matt black steel, these feature New York, London or Paris.
Typography Is Everything poster designed by Simon C Page. $15.00. Fine art print on natural white, matte, ultra smooth, 100% cotton rag, acid and...
3 tags
Introducing Siri – a new sans-serif font from...
Siri was designed by Göran Söderström, a talented young Swedish designer. It is a labour of love and a true super-family with a total of 24 styles.
The Siri family was designed from the start to perform well on screen, and Siri Core includes four hand-hinted fonts tuned for use at body text sizes. Siri has a large x-height, modest contrast and slightly condensed letter forms, giving great...
November 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Fontdeck Adfont Calendar Returns
The Adfont Calendar has returned for a second year! It’s not your ordinary advent calendar - each day we showcase one of our favourite typefaces of the year and give away a free web font license from the family. That’s 24 free fonts in all.
And if that wasn’t enough we’ve scattered some great (and maybe just cheeky) visual treats throughout the rest of the calendar So...
4 tags
In the Showcase: Aston Martin, 4AD and The Plant
Here are some more fabulous designs in our series showcasing web sites using Fontdeck.
Aston Martin was recently voted Britain’s coolest brand for the fifth time in six years. Using Hermann Zapf’s Classico throughout, the site conveys that sharp sense of cool and quality magnificently.
4AD is one of favourite indie record labels. Their redesigned site makes great use of DIN...
October 2011
1 post
Our Thoughts on the Typekit Acquisition
The Fontdeck team was delighted to hear the news that Adobe has acquired fellow web font service, Typekit.
The web font world is a small and friendly one, and we know many of the folk at Typekit well, from both their work there and prior to the web font revolution. We talk regularly, have worked together on projects like the WebFont Loader, and we’ve had Typekit folk as guest speakers at...
September 2011
2 posts
5 tags
In the Showcase: Brent Riddell, Penny Black and...
In this latest showcase post, we look at some more websites with outstanding typographic design.
Australian-German designer Brent Riddell makes excellent use of the highly distinctive typeface Adso, a contemporary gothic script font by Bureau des Affaires Typographiques . Pairing the font with an electric yellow breathes contempory life into a design that is edgy, distinctive, exciting and...
3 tags
Introducing Abril Text & Display
Abril is a fabulous new font family from Type Together. Abril is a font family of two worlds: 8 text styles and 10 display styles.
Abril Display superimposed on Abril Text
Abril Text
The four main text weights of Abril Text have been manually hinted ensuring superb rendering across all platforms.
Abril Text on in IE8 on Windows XP
The text styles are inspired by 19th century slab...
August 2011
4 posts
6 tags
In the Showcase: Park & Bond, Business Birmingham...
The first installment of a ongoing series of posts highlighting fabulous typographic website designs which have caught our eye.
Park & Bond is a high quality online men’s store mixing top brands with inspiring editorial content. The all-caps Futura Bold provides that stamp of quality for the shopping experiences. This is offset by p.s.type’s Quatro Slab Ultra Black providing stand-out...
3 tags
Hyphenation arrives in Firefox and Safari
Pretty much the only forms of Western literature that don’t use hyphenation are children’s books and websites. Until now. Yesterday’s release of Firefox 6 and last month’s release of Safari 5.1 on OS X Lion mean that two browsers now support CSS 3 hyphenation.
Turning on hyphenation is easy. Just add this rule to your stylesheet:
p { hyphens:auto; }
Well, almost. In reality Firefox and...
LocalStorage in use on the Fontdeck Website
We are now using LocalStorage to store and update sample text on the Fontdeck website.
This HTML5 API is very useful, it allows you to store data locally on a user’s machine and we thought we’d take the time to explain how we’re using it.
Here are some useful resources for those interested in using LocalStorage: Dive Into HTML5 - Local Storage
SmartStorage by Andy Hume
...
4 tags
How to Use Chromatic Fonts on the Web
Chromatic font families are collections of fonts which are designed to be used together in different colours and positioned on top of each other to create special effects with text.
At its most basic, a chromatic font family contains a fill and an outline font. Sometimes a complex version of a font can be used with a basic version. By varying the colour of these fonts and putting one over the...
July 2011
1 post
Improved Language Support on Fontdeck
With a recent update, we’ve updated the pages for web fonts with Non-Latin character sets.
When we launched Fontdeck one year ago, one of our ambitions was to offer fonts for a wide range of languages. In addition to fonts with Latin characters, we also support Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian and most recently, Cherokee characters.
It’s all well and good providing these web fonts but we...
June 2011
3 posts
Ampersand Conference
In three short years the web has been radically transformed. There have been many advances in technology that have led to this, including media queries and CSS3 transforms, transitions and animations. From a typographical perspective, the most radical transformation has been the birth of webfonts.
We had high expectations for Ampersand conference. For a start, the lineup was incredible. Well...
1 tag
Ampersand(s)
.ampersands {
overflow: hidden;
margin: 2em -1em 1em 0;
}
.ampersands li {
display: block;
padding-right: 1em;
padding-bottom: 1em;
float: left;
width: 102px;
height: 11em;
}
.ampersands li img {
display: block;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
opacity: 0.9;
}
.ampersands li:hover img {
opacity: 1;
}
As the premier sponsor for the Ampersand web typography...
Win a Gift Box!
.giftbox-images {
overflow: hidden;
}
.giftbox-images a {
display: block;
float: left;
width: 49.5%;
}
.giftbox-images a img {
display: block;
}
Announcing the Winners
The competition has now ended, and we are very pleased to announce our winners! In no particular order, the winning entries were created by Jonathan Stephens, Jeremy Britten and Martin Freer.
You can see the winning entries on...
May 2011
3 posts
Targetting Web Fonts with Media Queries
You can use CSS media queries to fine tune your use of web fonts. For example, you might decide that when your web site is viewed on very small screens, web fonts are not required.
Web designers have been able to target specific media for a while by using different style sheets for different media types such as ‘screen’ or ‘print’. Now with CSS3, we have media queries. A...
3 tags
VirusFonts joins Fontdeck!
We’re bowled over to announce the iconic font foundry VirusFonts as Fontdeck’s latest foundry partner. Virus is the font foundry of Jonathan Barnbrook, one of the truly original voices in British design and typography of recent times.
Top: Patriot, Delux and Bourgeois. Bottom: Newspeak, Regime and Tourette
Inherent to the work of his design studio, Barnbrook produces experimental,...
Free web fonts at Ampersand
Ampersand is the UK’s first web typography conference. It is being held on 17th June 2011 in Brighton’s historic Corn Exchange, and Fontdeck is proud to be a sponsor.
Ampersand is an affordable one-day event for knowledgable web designers & type enthusiasts, tying together the overlapping worlds of type design, web design, standards and software. The day promises to be chock...
April 2011
4 posts
Celebrating British Type
Never ones to shy away from a bandwagon, we at Fontdeck thought we’d celebrate the Royal Wedding by celebrating a handful typefaces rooted in British history.
Caslon
In 1720, the English gunsmith William Caslon turned his hand to typeface design, and in 1722 designed a typeface in his name. The typeface took cues from Dutch Baroque types, which were then used extensively in England....
WordPress plugin for Fontdeck
We’ve always supported WordPress but now we have made it even easier to use custom fonts on a WordPress website.
Using the WordPress plugin for Fontdeck
Once you’ve chosen your fonts and set up a website on Fontdeck, you can paste your code into the settings page of this plugin.
You will need a basic knowledge of CSS in order to use this plugin. We recommend you use a tool such as...
WhatFont Bookmarklet →
Ever wondered which fonts were being used on a website? This bookmarklet makes it easy.
9 tags
Showcasing great typographic websites
Thousands of people are using Fontdeck to enhance the typography of their websites. We’ve been showcasing many of these terrific designs for a while, but now we really wanted to draw your attention to some of our favourites:
.showcase-sites li {
width: 99%;
margin-top: 3em;
}
.showcase-sites li a img {
border: 1px solid #E5E5E5;
margin-bottom: 0.6666em;
}
WorkplaceDynamics...
March 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Fontsmith joins Fontdeck!
We’re really, really excited to announce that the influential type foundry Fontsmith has partnered exclusively with Fontdeck. Fontsmith’s typefaces have a design and appeal which translates superbly to use on the web, and all fonts have been optimised for display on screens across multiple platforms.
We’ve started off by adding six of Fontsmith’s best sellers to the catalogue:
FS Albert is a...
Fontdeck at South by Southwest
Is it that time of year already? The annual spring break for geeks that is South by Southwest Interactive begins today, and Fontdeck will be well represented.
Cofounder Richard Rutter will be talking about Where Web Typography Goes Now on Sunday at 5pm in Ballroom C of the Austin Convention Centre. He’ll be covering all manner of exciting stuff coming up in CSS 3, the advent of high resolution...
February 2011
3 posts
2 tags
Futura is back!
After a brief hiatus, we’re pleased to announce that Futura is once again available to license as a webfont from Fontdeck.
Designed in 1927 by Paul Renner, Futura is a classic geometric sans-serif typeface. The design is derived from simple geometric forms (near-perfect circles, triangles and squares) and is based on strokes of near-even weight, which are low in contrast. This results in a...
A world of Valentine's Day fonts
The wonderful thing about type is that your choice of font can say a lot about what it is you’re writing. We use fonts to convey our feelings and emotions. How surprising is it then, that come Valentine’s Day, the fonts we use to say “I love you” are so varied. A quick scan of the shelves in a card shop reveals at least six types of fonts commonly used to send that special message. Here they are,...
2 tags
Something Different for Your Valentine
Just My Type by Simon Garfield is “a book about fonts”. But it’s a book about fonts for people who aren’t into fonts. If the usual diet of chocolates and flowers is not your thing, this book could be the perfect gift for the type widow or widower in your life.
What really makes Just My Type is that its author has written a book of stories. And its author is just that: a writer rather than a...
December 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Jeremy Tankard Typography joins Fontdeck
We’re incredibly excited to announce that Jeremy Tankard Typography has partnered with Fontdeck. Starting off with Bliss, Aspect and Enigma, we’ll be providing webfonts for all of Jeremy’s superb typefaces, including the famous Shire Types.
Bliss
In developing Bliss, forms were chosen for their simplicity, legibility and ‘Englishness’ where forms are typically...
May the force of typography be with you
These wonderful posters have been blogged all over the web, but they’re too wonderful not to mention here as well.
They were designed by the clever folk at H-57 who are indicating they might be available to buy at some time in the future.
November 2010
1 post
Using Fontdeck with the Google WebFont Loader
The WebFont Loader is a JavaScript library that gives you extra control over font loading. It was co-developed by Google and Typekit and released as open source. This tutorial will get you started using the WebFont Loader with Fontdeck. We’ll try to keep it simple, but you will need a bit of JavaScript and CSS knowledge to keep up.
The WebFont Loader tells you when the following events happen as...
October 2010
2 posts
Supporting New Typeface Design
Fontdeck is proud to be sponsoring Letter.2, the typeface design competition organized by ATypI (the Association Typographique Internationale). A jury of renowned professionals will make a selection from typefaces published in the ten years since the first ATypI type competition.
Letter.2 hopes to promote typographic excellence, best professional practices, and raise awareness about the role...
Enter the Web Font Awards
Our friends at Carsonified and Monotype Imaging have put together the Web Font Awards to celebrate the very best in web fonts.
At the time of writing you’ve got about 3 weeks left to enter your site for a chance to win up to $3000 as well as some great fonts and an iPad. The winners will be announced in mid-November at the Future of Web Design conference in New York City.
You can enter...
September 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Le BAT joins Fontdeck with exciting new fonts
We’re really pleased to announce that the Bureau des Affaires Typographiques (BAT), an exciting new French type foundry, has partnered with Fontdeck. You may remember the BAT from such movies as:
Founded in 2009, the Bureau des Affaires Typographiques is an initiative of a young generation of French type designers to spread gorgeous, high-quality typefaces. Here’a few examples:
...
Meet us at dConstruct (and get free stuff)
Fontdeck is proud to be sponsoring this year’s dConstruct conference in Brighton, UK, on Friday 3rd September. Come and meet the team at our stand and grab some free goodies.
Sign up for Fontdeck while you’re there and we’ll also give you a very cool Baskerville Italic ampersand t-shirt designed by Aegir of Ministry of Type.
July 2010
1 post
2 tags
New fonts from Insigne
We’ve just added 12 new fantastic typefaces from the brilliant Insigne foundry.
First up there’s Chennai Sans and its companion Chennai Slab. Chennai is a contemporary, rounded, geometric and slightly extended face, great for informal body copy and perfect for adding impact to headings and display text.
Then we have Eigerdals, a visually warm sans-serif family with a soft and amiable face;...
June 2010
1 post
Fontdeck is go!
We’re hugely excited to announce that Fontdeck is up and running. We’ve got a selection of around 600 fonts from nearly 100 fantastic professional typefaces, which are all available for you to use as real text on a website today.
There’s no library to pay for. Instead you can dive in straight away, and start picking and testing out any of the fonts in the Fontdeck catalogue....
March 2010
1 post
Fontdeck and webfonts at SxSW
This year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas is taking on a significant webfonts flavour, with a party and panels a-plenty. The Fontdeck team will be there, so we hope to see you there too. Here’s the highlights:
Get Stoked On Web Typography
Friday, March 12 at 3:30pm (Ballroom E). The very talented Samantha Warren will be evaluating interesting offline lettering and...
January 2010
1 post
Fontdeck is nearly ready!
We’re currently undergoing testing in a private beta. As we scale up and add the final polish, we’ll be extending invitations to a wider audience. To join the list of testers, please either sign up on Fontdeck.com or follow our Twitter stream and you should hear from us in the next few weeks.
If you are a type designer or work for a font foundry, we’d especially love to hear...
November 2009
2 posts
“What I’m really excited about is the opportunity to embrace the new...”
– Christian Schwartz interviewed during Webfonts Week
The inaugural Fontdeck post
Welcome to the Fontdeck blog. Follow this for news of more foundries joining Fontdeck, new fonts, and updates to the service.