Font Replacement Comparison
Image by thebudman84
The use of “non-web-safe” fonts has been a demand of web designers for a long time.
Open source Web typography alternatives known as “font replacement” are available in the market.
Recently we’ve had a chance to use font replacement for one of our projects. Great stuff out there!
Having used sIFR in the past (example: Goedhuis & Co.) I wondered what other tools were available as sIFR alternatives… so I Googled for it.
I found 3 alternatives: typeface.js, Cufón and facelift (or FLIR).
I decided to download and install them one by one a compare them using a simple template with 3 headings.
Here is the outcome using “Neo Sans Light” (exception for typeface.js – it is using Century Schoolbook due to technical restrictions).
Caption: Left to right: Cufón, sIFR, faceflift, typeface,js
Conclusions? I don’t want to go into (the very exciting) technical details, so I’ll keep report the major findings only:
- Easy to install? Yes they are all easy to install once you’ve done 1 successfully. To get there is takes some reading.
- Fastest? typeface.js, then Cufón and facelift. sIFR was the slowest to load
- Flash? sIFR needs flash to run. The others run without flash
- Feel good factor? typeface.js has my vote. It was the easiest to setup and install. Everything kind of fell into place.
Decision time: what did we use in the end? sIFR.
This was due to typeface.js restriction where the font we bought “Neo Sans Light” gave an error when converting online: “Error: This font’s vendor has indicated that it is not permissible to embed this font.” – I sent them an email and hope to hear from typeface.js soon.
What about the future?
Well… who knows? The next generation of “font replacement” will be similar to gravatars (or “Globally Recognized Avatars“) that display user-provided pictures from a central database.
There will be “online font providers” the will provide “font-as-service“: the fonts your website needs. No more multiple step installations or Flash.
Typekit and Fontdeck are 2 steps in the right direction if you ask me.
What do you think?
Telmo wrote this on 16.09.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Design, Our sites, User experience box
On September 16th, 2009 at 6:30 pm, Joshua van der Broek responded:
It’s great to see developers getting excited about typography. When a visual design is very minimal the typography set down in the guidelines becomes one of the few visual assets – using this is essential.
On September 18th, 2009 at 10:59 am, Al Stevens responded:
Hi there, And thanks for the post. Very useful. As a long time user of sifr I have recently switched to a jquery alternative, which is based on sifr but the setup is slightly different. I recommend you check it out as it is arguably less fiddly to set up. Al
On September 18th, 2009 at 11:06 am, Steve responded:
Thanks Al, is this the jQuery alternative you’re referring to?
We’re fans of jQuery, so we’ll be sure to check it out!
On September 19th, 2009 at 10:47 am, Ash responded:
Extremely useful post, this. As a user of Sifr, it’s nice to be able to offer an alternative that doesn’t use Flash, if only to use as a backup if the user doesn’t have the Flash player installed….
On September 21st, 2009 at 3:34 pm, Matt Hill responded:
I’m really not a fan of sIFR, I found it way too complex.
I’ve become increasingly concerned about *all* these embedding solutions form a licencing perspective. I don’t think it’s reasonable for us as developers and designers to put fonts on our servers that others can download for free.
Sure, it goes without saying that no-one should be using SIFR or Cufon to embed fonts that don’t have a redistribute licence. But I’ve seen hundreds of sites using unlicensed fonts and that’s just not on.
Glad you mentioned Typekit, it’s been getting a lot of good press over the last few months. It’s the way to go to keep all parties happy.
On February 4th, 2010 at 2:00 am, Ash responded:
I’m a big fan of Cufon! SiFr is just too slow and the others don’t seem to include Latin characters and accents…
With Cufon. You don’t store the font on the server. You can also embed all the characters you need to use when you compile it…. It creates a javascript file of the font outline – clever. No redistribution there. It’s all compiled as Javascript… You ought to have a legit license for the font you are using tho ;)
In terms of Licensing, you should pay for every font you use ideally. Not that many people realise this.
Generally, foundries don’t check up on you – but they may, if you get to be high profile… So maybe it’s worth checking that your clients have correctly licensed the fonts they want to use!