Tag Archives: fonts

Make Art Deco Art Dammit⤴

from

Make Art Deco Art Dammit
Make Art Deco Art Dammit flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Today’s TDC was a bit footery to do. It asked us to go to a site and play with the fonts, but the link to do that was a bit broken by the website itself, so I needed to work around it to complete this. I went to the Velvetyne page and typed my words ‘make art, dammit’ into the search bar, then clicked on the word ‘art deco’ in the results and then clicked on ‘get the fonts’ – ‘my fonts’ and followed the links to the page. That brought me to a page with my words displayed in different fonts on a page.  At this point I realised that I should change my phrase, so I repeated everything using the phrase ‘make art deco art, dammit’ and then screenshot the one I liked (see above). All in all, fun to do.

5 minute Post Challenge – Fonts on my WordPress Blog⤴

from @ The H-Blog

The Problem

I got a DM on Twitter from a friend of mine in the Western Isles. He had been reading some of my #itr12 posts, and wanted to draw my attention to something pretty fundamental – he could hardly read the text! He suggested that changing the font and its size might be a good idea.

That’s gotta be prety simple, right?

I said “No problem” and headed off to edit my posts. Interesting thing though, my WordPress blog was offering me very limited font choices, and no way of selecting font size. Hmmmm. What’s a chap to do?

The solution (not so simple, as it happens)

The solution involved a number of things. It involved installing the Editor FontSize, FontMeister, Space Invaders, Text Control and WP Editor plugins for my blog (not just them as it happens, I tried a few others on for size too!). Basically, these all provide some sort of formatting help, meaning I can now choose my font size, line spacing and certain other features too. But the fonts are best of all.

What’s so good about these fonts then?

With any website, it has to take a gamble as it will never know what fonts are installed on the computer that it is being displayed on. Sure, Times New Roman is likely to be available, but apart from that it’s a lottery. Obviously there are some fonts which there is more chance of a computer having than other fonts, but esentially it’s a gamble. Websites get round this by suggesting a font family, or a list of fonts to try and an order to try them in. From an accessibility point of view, this isn’t great, as you can never be sure what font your reader will be seeing.

But all that is changing. Web Fonts are OpenSource fonts which are available from the web – that means that they don’t have to be installed on a computer to be able to be displayed on that computer. Using FontMeister I added some Google Web Fonts as options to my blog, and am currently trying the Andika font to see how I get on with it. There is talk of the Open Dyslexic font being available as a web font soon too.

How’d the 5 minutes go?

Turned out to be nearer 15, but that’s still okay for a post I reckon!!!!!