Optimising Web Fonts to enhance Web Performance

Over the years, there has been a lot of effort in getting typography on the web right. With the advent of variable fonts, we’re already witnessing how it improves the experience and even web performance.

We’ll explore how adding modern CSS capabilities such as layout grids and custom properties in the mix truly gives us superpowers to create practical dynamic type systems that are accessible, performant and works across various screen dimensions.

Typography has been one of the great challenges in digital design, particularly on the Web. The arrival of font embedding, and services like Typekit a few years ago extended the range of fonts available to designers significantly, but came with performance costs. And while designers developed ‘responsive’ techniques for layout, responsive typography, that adapts to […]

Regular readers will know of my near fixation with embeddable/downloadable fonts on the web, as now supported in Safari, Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10, and long supported (in a somewhat incompatible way with these other browsers) in Internet Explorer. But the technology has never taken off. Foundries and many type designers have been wary of […]

Regular readers will know the issue of embeddable/linkable fonts for the web is more than a passing interest here at Web Directions. Today, font designer Tal Leming talks about the issues from the perspective of folks who design typefaces, while Jeffrey Zeldman interviews Type designer David Berlow from a similar perspective. There’s little doubt the […]

Bert Bos, co-inventor of CSS, has a detailed summary of the issues around font embedding and standardization from a couple of months back. Why so much on this of late here? We feel at web directions that this is a development ultimately as significant as the rise of CSS for web design and development. We […]

If you want to get up to speed with the who, what, where how and when of Web fonts, this recent article by Jon Tan is the place to start.

Opera had just announced an Alpha of Opera 10, with some excellent support for new and emerging standards, including one of my favorites, font linking. Currently, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.1, and now Opera 10 support font linking via the @font-face mechanism. Internet Explorer has in fact supported this feature for many years, using the […]

This week, we launched the programme for our upcoming Next conference, “Product in the Age of AI and LLMs“, as well as the full programme for our Developer Summit conference, coming up in late November in Sydney and, of course, online. Check out the programmes, mark your calendars, and we’ll see you there for these fantastic events!  If you’d […]

Next week we have our brand new Engineering AI conference coming up. Now, clearly, there’s a lot of hype around AI as there has been for some years now. But if you’ve been following the newsletter for a while, you’ll know we have a particular interest in how AI, large language models, and machine learning […]

Last week we hosted UX Australia – the first for a couple of years. It was an amazing two days of in-depth expert talks on service design and user experience and all things modern design. The values of community, connection, and care emerge time and again across the talks. We’ll have the videos from the […]

The naive understanding of evolution is that species are continually evolving. This idea held sway for the first century or more after Darwin first published his theory of evolution. But the orthodox view of evolution today is of punctuated equilibrium—the idea that for most of their existence, species remain remarkably stable, punctuated by periods of […]

Before we get started, a couple of quick announcements. This week, we announced the full programme for two upcoming conferences: UX Australia (end of August in Melbourne) and Engineering AI (September 12th in Sydney). So if either of those sound valuable to you, take a look at the full lineup now, and both are in-person […]

For 3 decades now (indeed a little more) my life has revolved around the Web. Developing for it, developing software to help others develop for it, writing about it, teaching about it, talking about it. Curiously the last couple of weeks’ roundups have had some backwards looking aspects to them–last week we had a refresher […]