PSD to HTML, The Site Slinger, and Typekit
I had the great pleasure of listening to Jeff Veen, founder of Typekit, talk about a wide range of things last week. As lead developer at The Site Slinger, I had a particular interest in hearing Jeff speak as the problem him and his team at Typekit have addressed is something I deal with on a daily basis at The Site Slinger.
My team and I have done several hundred PSD to HTML conversions over the past year, and a common issue in all of these slices is how to deal with what we call “non web-friendly” font compatibility. Our clients might love to use a font called Athelas Web for all of their paragraph text, but at the end of day, it’s nearly impossible to do this when we have to take in account several different browser versions, licensing issues, among a wide array of other issues.
There are a few options, namely SiFR and Cufon. However, both of these solutions incur common problems on implementation. SiFR is great, and fairly easy to setup, but it does rely on Flash, and heavy use of it on your site can drastically affect page load times. Cufon, on the other hand, relies on JavaScript and can be used to replace a whole block of text without having to worry about page-load times, however in most browsers, when using Cufon, the font is no longer selectable.
I am happy to say that Typekit is the perfect alternative to SiFR and Cufon, and after spending an hour playing around with it, we have now implemented it on the Site Slinger website! Typekit is super simple to set up, and after signing up for an annual plan, you have several hundred unique fonts available with the click of a few buttons. Our kit size which includes three different fonts, comes in at around 375kb which is something we can probably decrease slightly by removing some of the unused weights and styles from our kit. We were able to rework the home page of our site to use Typekit, and thus we no longer have to use background images to display the non-web friendly fonts.
Going forward, we will also be suggesting Typekit implementation for all of our clients. If you are interested, just let us know when you submit your next order!
The Site Slinger is a web design company based in Austin, TX and Boston, MA. We provide outstanding code and excellent customer service. Our main mission at The Site Slinger is to provide a high quality service while still maintaining sensitivity towards our client's timeframes. Our price match and quality guarantee ensures satisfaction. We serve to please!