Web Design Tips: Cufón is a Fast Font Replacement Solution

An easy-to-implement JavaScript called Cufón allows web designers to quickly embed visually interesting fonts on their web pages, opening up new opportunities for typographical design elements.

Every medium has constraints. For print, there are things like size, ink density, and paper quality. For video, even the best available HDTV only musters up about 2.1 megapixel resolution (HD 1080p is 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels). On the Internet, those constraints can be things like bandwidth, screen size, or—today's topic—fonts.

Every computer has some number of fonts installed. The most common of these are generally referred to as "web safe," meaning you can be pretty sure that if you specify one of these common fonts in your CSS or HTML, the person who visits your page will see the font face you defined. But this can be limiting. What if you want a custom font that almost no one will have installed?

In this "Web Design Tips," I am going to describe one possible way to do font replacement, and show you how to implement it with Cufón.

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Web Shop Design: Using Flash Effectively

The question as to what and how much animation is appropriate for a Web site has plagued Web developers ever since the early days of the Internet. While tools such as Flash now include smart features that overcome some of their early limitations, this doesn't mean that every site needs Flash content. In this article, I'll explain some of the benefits and disadvantages of Flash and tell you what you need to do to make sure Flash works for you and not against you.

Flash: The Good and Bad

Flash is a common plug-in with Adobe research showing that 99 percent of Web users have Flash available. So, it is fair to assume that anyone visiting your site can probably view Flash content. If you choose to use Flash, one thing you'll like about it is that it is pretty much browser independent so you can expect your Flash movie to look the same in all browsers, which is not the case with HTML or CSS.

On the downside, Flash movies, particularly those that have not been designed correctly, can be slow to download and display leaving a delay between when the visitor gets to your site and when the content starts to play. This can be particularly annoying when a Web site is created entirely in Flash — a visitor won't see anything until the site has loaded. This experience is bad enough when using a DSL or broadband connection, and for dial-up users it's even worse.

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New tool could make web development simpler

Having a web presence is a must these days but developing that presence is not easy, especially if you are starting from square one. A new tool from Fresh Tilled Soil could make the process simpler. Rapid Web Prototyping gives developers guides to use while developing HTML/CSS web pages, speeding up the process.

According to the company, websites have been developed in as little as three weeks; most, however, take between four and six weeks to complete. If you've checked in with other web development companies, you know this is quite a bit quicker than other options.

Here is how it works: developers begin by creating the user interface. By polling consumers about what works, which areas need more information and which areas are ready to go, marketers can be more certain that the website will be user-friendly once it goes live. From the customer phase, developers actually begin developing the full site.

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Web Page Layouts Shouldn't Use Tables

I've been focusing on CSS positioning and creating tableless (and frameless) layouts, but maybe you don't really understand why you want to do this. After all, there are still people using browsers that don't reliably support these types of layouts. Plus, they can be harder to build, and most HTML editors don't yet support them. But there are still many reasons to learn how to write CSS layouts.

Valid XHTML

This is the number one reason to use CSS for layout. If you use tables for layout, you are writing invalid XHTML. Tables are only valid in XHTML when displaying tabular data. For example, the data in the accompanying image is something that might be created from a spreadsheet or database. It is "tabular data" and should be displayed in a table.

Using CSS to position and layout your pages is the only valid way to get the designs you used to use tables to create.

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Are the Job Titles "Web Designer" and "Web Developer" Too General?

The web poses an interesting problem: where for example does slicing, XHTML and CSS come in?

There are a lot of professions that have emerged from the web: designers, developers, strategists, search engine optimists, information architects, usability and accessibility consultants, the list goes on…

Today, I’d like to talk about the first two. I wouldn’t go so far to say that the titles should be considered harmful by any means, rather we have just outgrown our job titles!

In the last three jobs that I have worked, there seems to large differences of opinions in the definitions of the job descriptions of web designers and web developers. As most folks in management see it, the definitions are pretty obvious: designers make the pretty pictures; developers bring them to life with code. However, the web poses an interesting problem: where does slicing, XHTML and CSS come in? Is it something that only developers do because it’s code? Is it something that designers are responsible for because of the constraints the technologies pose on their designs? Is this an opportunity for a third job to be created?

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