You’ve probably noticed the new header on this site. And depending on what web browser you use, you might have noticed some other changes.
With the release of Firefox 3.5, I decided to look into using embedded fonts. In the past, web designers have mostly been limited to the fonts pre-installed on most people’s computers, or creating an image. That’s fine for something where the text never changes, like a banner…but not so great for body text or headlines. There have been methods to work around it, but I always thought that using Flash animations for headlines was kind of overkill.
So I tried out some fonts, and along the way made some other adjustments to the site. Comment boxes should no longer push into the sidebar on multi-level replies, for instance. I added drop-shadows to headings on browsers that support it, and adjusted the main font size a bit for readability.
Embedded fonts are currently supported in Safari, Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10 beta. There is a way to embed fonts on Internet Explorer, but it uses another type of font file and the converter tools are a pain to use. It took me at least an hour and a half to figure out what I had to do. Then the result looked terrible, so I pulled it out.