With that being said, it’s time for a break, and it’s the holiday season, so The Site Slinger team will be taking a 3 week hiatus into January where we will be reworking our development process, developing our new website, and working on a few other cool things to make 2011 an even better year.

See you all in 2011.

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!

You should check out their site at idesignyourlogo.com.  Not only can you see Tony’s awesome logo creations, but you can also ready Dana’s brilliant daily blog posts.  Even if you aren’t in the market for a logo, seriously check out the site and tell all your friends.

Oh, by the way, in case you were wondering, Tony and Dana love us too:

“The team at The Site Slinger is our hero! Against all odds, Connor and his team managed to get us up and running in record time (despite our ignorance). They have just the right blend of geekness and coolness, which means that they do awesome work AND know how to communicate. I recommend them to everyone, even those that don’t ask. Oh, and did I mention that they’re awesome? Thought I’d say it just one more time. Awesome. Can’t help myself.”

So what’s the purpose of this blog? Over the coming year, we plan to update this space on a weekly basis with everything from project up dates, to random tidbits of information that we find interesting.

Credit goes to Tony and Dana at I Design Your Logo who helped us with the logo, and came up with the name for us. More on them in a later post.