Home sweet homepage

After lots of searching, Bright Spark Digital has a new home. We’ve not moved far from our temporary home in Bermondsey Street and will now be located in-between London and Tower Bridge.

The obligatory trip to IKEA beckons as well as some serious cleaning and painting work before we’ll be all set. Please see the Contact page for the new address.

Speaking of new homes, you’ve probably also noticed we’ve finally got our new website up and running. As well as a fresh lick of Photoshop paint, we’ve also added a Twitter feed so you can see what’s getting us fired up over BSD HQ.

Thumbs up for the Web Open Font Format

Since the birth of the World Wide Web and HTML browsing, web developers have always had to work hard accommodating the typographic dreams of creative directors and designers. As browser technology has evolved, so have the options for web typography. Over recent years, there has been an ever increasing number of ways to render type within a web browser (GIF image text, SIFR, FLIR, SVG, EOT, Cufon etc.) None of these have been truly standard, cross platform and cross browser solutions.

The latest Firefox 3.6 browser release adds support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and will hopefully provide real momentum for its acceptance as the de-facto font file format for use within browsers and web pages.

Whilst SIFR and Cufon provide decent vector font replacement techniques, creating WOFF files and embedding them in a page using CSS3 syntax really is a breeze (anyone who’s used Microsoft Weft to create Embedded OpenType files will certainly appreciate the simplicity).

There are a lot of folks hoping Microsoft and Google also get behind this one. If they do, it might finally allow web developers and designers to get on with things font-related using a standard convention rather than wondering which hack to use or which browser they won’t support.

As well as improvements in browser capabilities, such as Firefox’s WOFF support, websites such as TypeKit and FontSquirrel provide simple mechanisms to generate or embed custom fonts within web sites. FontSquirrel provides access to many fonts free of EULA issues as well as an excellent web font generation service. This creates a pret-a-porter zip file containing web font files, sample CSS and HTML for OTF and TTF fonts that you upload. This is a great way to simplify getting the correct files and font-face definitions into your web pages.

TypeKit takes a slightly different approach, operating as a subscription service and uses a JavaScript include file to add bespoke font-face rules according to a browser’s capabilities. I’m sure there are many more font services out there too, hopefully all helping drive towards an open standard for web fonts.

Overall it should be an interesting year in web typography for designers and developers alike. We'll be keeping our eye on how it all unfolds.

Useful links
http://www.w3.org/2009/08/WebFonts/charter.html
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/About_WOFF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_typography
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator
http://typekit.com/