When Tim Brown released v2 of the Web Font Specimen (WFS) a few weeks back, he honoured me by asking for my feedback a couple of days before releasing it to the world. I had a couple of suggestions that he took into consideration but ultimately decided to leave aside. Since he licensed WFS with Creative Commons, I decided to make my own variant using my initial suggestions.
The three changes I’ve made are fairly small and revolve around the Body Size Comparison section of four fonts. I’ve substituted Verdana for Tim’s choice of Times New Roman, as Times is rarely used on the web. Verdana, on the other hand, is probably the most widely used and most readable web font of all.
To further aid in this comparison, I’ve shifted the specimen’s font to the right one position. It now has Georgia on its left, and Verdana on its right, with Arial taking the far right position. This way, whether you’re testing a serif or sans within WFS, your font is always adjacent to both its style mate and complement for easy compare and contrast.
Finally, I’ve added a paragraph set in each of the four fonts beneath the comparison section. The whole point of evaluating web type is to ensure that it is legible, suitable—and don’t forget beautiful—when set in the browser. Now you can compare how well your font works in paragraph form against these three web stalwarts.
And, just as you can use FontFriend with the WFS, you can use it with the Soma WFS.
Enough with the chit-chat. View the orignal. View the Soma WFS. Or, grab the Soma Web Font Specimen zip. Go make beautiful type on the web.
Tim Brown released the Web Font Specimen in conjunction with his article Real Web Type in Real Web Context on A List Apart back in November. He updated it last week to v2 which is laser-focused on seeing what your type looks like in your browser.
One very cool component of this release is that Typekit—who Tim now works for—has integrated the Web Font Specimen into their service. See, for example, FF Meta Serif Web Pro Book.
But the part that makes me blush is that Tim decided to include FontFriend on the new Web Font Specimen homepage as an ideal companion to the specimen. In order to feel like I deserved a spot on there, I’ve added a special feature to FontFriend: it now detects if you’re on the Web Font Specimen demo and automatically updates the font name when you select a font family.
Don’t have FontFriend yet? Go to the FontFriend project page and get it now.
WordPress 3.0 was released last week (and there was much rejoicing). I received a few bug reports about my integration with the new nav menus - essentially if you didn’t have a nav menu in use yet, you’d see a weird extra box in your main menu area.
I also did the long-overdue task of combing through the theme (which was based on the old Sandbox theme) and removing all deprecated function calls. Scary.
Also in this release are a few new translations from intrepid translators: Polish (props Paweł), French, (props Vermont), and Indonsian (props Cahya).
As always, the download is on the project page if you’re too impatient for it to show up on WP.org.
This isn’t “new” news, but in the webfont wild west, quality might pass you by. One large problem with webfonts is that the quality of most fonts that are suitably licensed for webfont embedding—in other words, free fonts—is not that high. Services such as Typekit remain the predominant way to get your hands on high-quality commercial fonts (although FontSpring is a notable exception).
But, for those looking to find the best quality free webfonts, the good folks at Good Web Fonts have put together an excellent list of high-quality free fonts suitable for web use. I’ve discovered some hidden gems there, and it’s now first on my list of places to consult when deciding on a webfont for a new design.
First off, it’s been a wild ride since The Erudite was made a featured theme in the WordPress.org themes directory. It went from about 20 downloads a day to over 200! With it has come an increase in bug reports and a some help with more translations. I hope that all of these downloads means that some kickass writing is being done.
The Erudite 2.6.1 is a maintenance release packing a lot of power for such a little increment. It includes:
- Better support for the upcoming WP 3.0’s custom menus. You can now explicitly set a menu as your “Header Menu”.
- Properly internationalized some strings that weren’t previously. If you’re a translator, update to the newest the-erudite.pot in the translations/ directory.
- Removed previous use of get_the_modified_author() in favour of get_the_author(). I have no idea why I thought the former was ever a useful idea.
- Added a Swedish translation. Props Fredrik.
EDIT: I neglected to add the Norwegian translation to 2.6.1, so 2.6.2 includes that. Thanks Rune!
As always, you can download from the project page while waiting for it to show up in the themes directory.