Soma Design

Font­Friend got a lit­tle shoutout in this mon­th’s issue of Print mag­a­zine. Thanks to Bev for let­ting me know!

Print, April 2010, p.80. Click image for full size.

Print does­n’t seem to put much of their mag­a­zine’s con­tent on their web­site, so I took the pho­to above. If you don’t feel like read­ing the grainy iPhone pho­to (no, I was­n’t about to spend $20 just to stroke my ego), here’s the full text:

Occa­sion­al­ly dur­ing a web pro­jec­t’s con­struc­tion phase, the design­er will decide that the type does­n’t look quite right. This is often due to slight but still notice­able dif­fer­ences between Pho­to­shop’s text ren­der­ing and that of the mul­ti­ple browsers a site has to sup­port. In response, the design­er some­times has to do mul­ti­ple rounds of slight tweaks to size and spacing.

To help with this, Soma Design’s Matt Wiebe offers the Font­Friend book­marklet. Just drag it to your brows­er tool­bar, acti­vate it on the page you want to edit, and a pan­el is exposed that can be used to edit a selec­tion of the most com­mon brows­er text set­tings. A few sim­ple pre­sets are offered for text that is affect­ed, but the pow­er of the jQuery Javascript library’s selec­tor engine is avail­able for more spe­cif­ic selec­tions. (An explana­to­ry link is pro­vid­ed from the pan­el, but it’s any­thing you could do with basic CSS syn­tax, and more.)

Ide­al­ly, the task of using Font­Friend would be hand­ed off tot the design­er direct­ly, who could send final mod­i­fi­ca­tions straight to production.

For more pro­gres­sive web designs using the new @font-face pos­si­bil­i­ties, the book­marklet can take care of a new fea­ture in Fire­fox 3.6 that allows you to drag a font file direct­ly onto the pan­el to select the fam­i­ly of your choice.