Awesome-Fontstacks: free web fonts with failsafes to back them up

Thanks for the flowers (I'm one of the creators of this little project). Regarding the packaging/download: We'd love to do that but it takes a lot of work technically (and currently this is more of a hobby project) and a lot of work regarding the licensing. Although currently all fonts we have should be free for web use, most of them would probably require additional licensing if we would repackage them. We'd love to do cooperations with services like fontsquirrel (most of our fonts are taken from their site and their excellent webfont packager), but that's future talk.

As a closing remark: It was (and still is) a lot of fun to see so many people care for something we built mostly in 48 hours during the railsrumble 2010. We had some additional iterations after that, but the core still is rumble material.

Maybe something sneaky could be done if the fonts are properly cached, ie. load them AFTER the very first page load on a timer after the page is complete - then the following page loads would have the fonts and/or re-render the page after the load is complete.

That's called FOUT (flash of unstyled text)

http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/ describes two different methods you can use to fight it -- I prefer the first where you hide content till load (or 3 seconds) in FF 3.5+

Last time I tested the FF4 betas the FOUT was still present.

Our source is this, so I guess the answer is yes:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Museo-Slab

Generally we encourage people to notify us if font licenses change. Which they sometimes do. Which is a shame.

The whole font licensing business is crap, I can agree to that.

$/Views? who came up with those pricing for fonts? really.

we've finally found someone more clueless about new medias than RIAA?

It would be nice, to have a list of all fonts longer than 5 incrementals. As the bundles are more or less random, I don't think that searching is more important than browsing.

Some kind of filter, e.g. based on tags would be great (serif, sans-serif, geometric, humanist, script etc.)

> Has anyone figured out the fix for that yet?

Sure they have: you need to use fonts like Verdana, Georgia, and the Microsoft "C" fonts, which were optimised at great expense for on-screen use so they look way better than any of the examples on the site we're discussing, and are widely and immediately available so you don't get the flash of unstyled content during page load.

I'm sorry if that sounds cynical, but the harsh reality is that right now, for professional quality work, those are your options. Downloadable font technology isn't ready for prime-time yet, and it won't be until the fonts have professional quality screen hinting, the browsers actually use those hints in their renderers, the delivery mechanism is fast enough to avoid that FOUC and doesn't eat bandwidth like it's starving (particularly on mobile devices), and the business model/pricing plan for commercial fonts is sane.

For now, I'm afraid @font-face is just an interesting experiment. All it seems to prove so far is that loads of web design bloggers are willing to make their sites actually look worse than they did before, even completely illegible in some widely used OS/browser combinations, if it keeps them on the leading edge.

Likewise, services like Typekit are based on a business model that assumes fonts are worth paying for by the month, unlike any other graphic design work and resources that are licensed for a one-off fee. I think most font foundries still don't get it: as web designers/developers, we do have several alternative techniques for most practical applications, and they are tried, tested, just as accessible to visitors with special needs (and search engine bots), and completely legal without paying for any web font licence or similar nonsense. It would be fascinating to know whether any professional designers actually use this sort of service for work their clients are paying serious money for, or whether it really is restricted to trendy web design blogs and the like. I'm darn sure none of my clients would accept an ongoing fee, on terms I can't control, in perpetuity, just to keep their site from breaking.

Sorry for the negative post, but every time I see one of these stories, I hope that someone has finally produced alternative fonts that are actually good for the advertised use, and so far, every single time I have been disappointed.

(Just to be clear, I am not having a dig at the Awesome Fontstacks site itself. These problems are not their fault.)

As long as font smoothing is enabled, which I believe vista and 7 do by default now, most of the Typekit fonts look ok. I wrote up a blog post not too long ago about dealing with users that don't support font smoothing:

http://dev.codio.com/graceful-degradation-for-non-web-standa...