Modern furniture retailer, Room & Board improves site with web fonts

Room & Board® is a national retailer that provides handcrafted, American-made furniture. For over thirty years, the company has focused on the simple idea that good design should be beautiful, affordable and long lasting. Room & Board’s attention to detail can be seen in fine typography throughout its stores, in print and on its website.

The www.roomandboard.com website features the Gill Sans® regular and light fonts in menus, headlines and titles. Like many other websites it previously used images to control its typography. But thanks to web fonts this is quickly changing. The Room & Board web team is upgrading the site to switch from images to text by using web fonts. This change will enhance the site with better performance, accessibility and indexability. Using web fonts instead of images saves time and reduces the need to manually generate graphics using a program like Adobe® Photoshop®.

www.roomandboard.com

FontsLive web fonts now delivered to Blackberry 6 OS mobile devices

We are happy to report that we have enhanced the FontsLive web fonts service to support new Blackberry smartphones running Blackberry® 6 OS. These devices feature a new web browser (based on Webkit). This new browser includes support for web fonts using CSS @font-face.

Smartphones with the new Blackberry 6 OS include the BlackBerry Torch™ 9800 and Blackberry Style™ 9760. Some previous models can be upgraded: click here to see if your Blackberry can support an upgrade to Blackberry 6 OS.

With this new addition we now deliver webfonts to three different mobile platforms:

• Android™ OS 2.2+
• Blackberry 6 OS
• iOS® 4.1+ (iPhone®, iPad® and iPod® touch)

We will continue to add support for even more mobile browsers/platforms as they are upgraded to support downloadable web fonts.

Trends in Web Font Usage

We are continuing to see a wide variety of sites deploying web fonts. On our Web Fonts Gallery we are proud to showcase different customers using web fonts from FontsLive.

Websites large and small are recognizing the technical and aesthetic benefits of web fonts. The most visible impact of web fonts can be seen in headlines. Here web designers and developers are finding the flexibility of using real fonts with CSS @font-face. No longer constrained to using images or graphics to show words in desired typefaces, web developers are enhancing their sites in dramatic, exciting ways.

Here are some recent additions to the FontsLive.com web fonts gallery:


www.tablespoon.com - This recipe website is using the font Amasis™ in a striking manner for its white on black headlines and also in drop-down menus.


nsw.gov.au  – The NSW Government (New South Wales, Australia) has used the Lindsey™ regular & bold fonts in its headlines to invoke a vibrant personality to its site. It tastefully spices up its headings with a fresh, youthful energy.


www.cmsfx.com – CMS Forex specializes in trading software and services for the financial industry. It recently implemented the Rockwell® slab serif font into its sub-heads in a very colorful manner.

Introducing Web Fonts in Action

The Fonts Live team is excited to announce the release of our new web font preview tool, Web Fonts in Action! It’s been a long-time coming, but it’s finally here. Using some fancy programming behind the scenes (custom CSS, JavaScript and HTML manipulation), we let you see what your website looks like with web fonts.

With Web Fonts in Action you simply enter the URL of your choice, select a heading and body font from our extensive catalog and instantly see your website displayed in different fonts.

Web Fonts in Action has some exciting features created for us by the talented web development team at DevBridge. For example, we provide a visual preview of each font and filtering by style, language and foundry, make finding the right font easy. Because Web Fonts in Action works on all modern browsers, including Internet Explorer, you can see how your web fonts will render across multiple browser types. After you find the right font combination for your website, you can add them to your cart and checkout in just a few clicks. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

FontsLive.com announces enhanced web fonts support to Apple devices with iOS 4.2 software update

FontsLive delivers web fonts to any browser with web font support – whether on desktop or mobile devices. For the past six months we have delivered web fonts to Apple devices with the Safari mobile browser. This includes the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

This past week Apple released the iOS 4.2 software update. This update added support for web fonts in the TrueType format. Previously Apple devices only supported web fonts in the SVG format, which was problematic due to issues with font families containing multiple weights.

Apple devices with web fonts support

Today we updated the FontsLive web font service has to address these improvements in Apple iOS 4.2, and we encourage all users of Apple devices to download this new update.

We are committed to delivering web fonts to as many devices as possible. Android 2.2 supports web fonts, which FontsLive supports. We will continue to expand our service to other mobile devices as they embrace web fonts.

Read more info on FontsLive browser support

New web fonts: Baker Signet & Elephant now available

We are continuing to expand our web fonts catalog and are pleased to announce these new additions:

Baker Signet
Baker Signet was designed by well-known calligrapher Arthur Baker in 1965 for Visual Graphic Corporation (VGC). This version from Paratype includes both Latin and Cyrillic character sets.

Elephant & Elephant Italic
Elephant and Elephant italic were designed by Matthew Carter, one of the most-praised type designers of our time. They are a careful re-working of a traditional English extra-bold serif style and are great for eye-catching headlines.

Font-weight issues with web fonts

The CSS “font-weight” property is used to define the weight of a font, such as regular or bold. This article describes how to best use font families that have extended weights that may range from Extra Light all the way to Extra Black.

Here is how a regular and bold weight would be defined:
   font-weight:normal
   font-weight:bold

But for all other weights a numerical range from 100 to 900 is used. One of the challenges with web fonts is that most web browsers do not properly support font weights other than normal & bold. The following chart describes the possible mappings of weights to the numeric definitions:

• 100    Extra Light or Ultra Light
• 200    Light or Thin
• 300    Book or Demi
• 400    Normal or Regular
• 500    Medium
• 600    Semibold, Demibold
• 700    Bold
• 800    Black, Extra Bold or Heavy
• 900    Extra Black, Fat, Poster or Ultra Black

How FontsLive solves the issues with font-weight

We have solved the font-weight issue with our web font service by allowing you to customize the font-family name for each web font. For example you can create a font-family definition for EndurancePro-Light, and then use the ‘font-weight:normal’ definition (versus ‘font-weight:100’ which does not work properly across all browsers).

You will find the option to customize the font-family name after you have added fonts to a CSS resource in the Web Font Manager in your account.

Here is an example using the Mayberry Pro font family:

{ font-family: "Mayberry Pro Light"; font-weight: normal; }

{ font-family: "Mayberry Pro Medium"; font-weight: normal; }

{ font-family: "Mayberry Pro"; font-weight: normal; }

{ font-family: "Mayberry Pro Semibold"; font-weight: bold; }

{ font-family: "Mayberry Pro Bold"; font-weight: bold; }

{ font-family: "Mayberry Pro Extrabold"; font-weight: bold; }

{ font-family: "Mayberry Pro Black"; font-weight: bold; }