Notes and news, insights and inspiration from the autonomous collective mind of GS.

This is the year we stop using graphics instead of HTML text for fonts on the web. Here’s the how and the why.

How? Why go graphic when there’s a plethora of alternatives. Smashing Magazine has a good comparison of web font embedding services. Be sure to see the comments at the end of the article for additional font services.

Additionally, @font-face Face Off has a handy-dandy chart that summarizes features and options of several font services.

Why? We’ve got 11 reasons … and counting.

1. Translations. Unlike graphics, text can be translated via Google Translate. For a little perspective, the Google Translate widget on one client site gets 52,400 visits per month out of 400,000 total visits. Text is dynamically translated to 50 different languages.
2. Usability. Users can only search for text on a page that isn’t in graphics.
3. Accessibility. 508 compliance and screen readers. For a scary real life example, consider that Target lost a $6 million lawsuit related to compliance issues.
4. SEO. More Googlejuice - and you want Googlejuice.
5. Dynamic content. Obviously graphical text isn’t an option for sites that pull in dynamically updated content such as blogs and CMS- driven sites. And more and more sites are being built this way.
6. Abandoning graphics for text is the more accepted general practice for sites that have been built over the past 1-5 years. Graphics for text is so 10 years ago. Even using graphics for headlines is a sign that your site is antiquated.
7. You can save a shit-ton of time when text needs to be modified.
8. Quality. Vector-based type looks better on devices with sharp resolution, like iPhone 4. Plus, they can be re-sized via your browser.
9. Load time. If your page has just text to load vs. graphics, load time will be greatly reduced, thereby decreasing the appearance of large blank areas in your page during initial load.
10. Bandwidth. This goes along with #9, but using text decreases bandwidth being used.
11. Because we can. It is 2011. There are new options available. Using download-able fonts can give you more interesting fonts and still provide a lot of the flexibility of typical web fonts.