Update: Paul Irish wrote a nice article about this: Bulletproof @font-face syntax.

There is a revolution on the way, just started! For years web designers have been strugling with the limited font faces available for web design, limited by font faces installed by default on the computers of the website visitors. This is changed now in a radical way. We can use any font now.

Look mom: no javascript and no flash needed!

A few weeks ago, a very clear reference was published about the current state of the use of font faces on the web. Any website designer might be interested to read:

http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2009/10/30/how-to-use-css-font-face/

A real gift of the article is a link mentioned to a online font convertor. With this tool you can upload a font and receive a zip file with different formats of the fonts (different browsers support different font face formats) plus a ready-made CSS file. Tools like this are really helpful:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

Don't you need a licence to use custom font faces?

Yes. All font faces that are not Open Source need a licence before you can use them. Many font licence holders are not ready yet to provide special licences to use font faces on any thing else then printed material. Some licence holders are ready, and others are working on it.

A new start-up company called TypeKit is trying to sign agreements with big licence holder parties, and offering a service for designers who do not want to worry about licences and getting sued.

Another option is to try to find free font faces, or open source fonts.

Font hunt

Hunting the internet for free fonts, I found a great open source font in the listing:

http://www.subtraction.com/2009/11/18/font-hunt

Titillium

The brand new design Titillium is actually an open source project being designed by students at Urbino Accademia di Belle Arti in Italy. The project was first presented a year ago and was updated as recently as late last month; the source files for all of the fonts are freely available for anyone to download and manipulate.

http://www.campivisivi.net/titillium/

This is the font face you see on the website now, providing you have a modern brower. Supported browers are: Explorer 6 and up, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera.

Revolution!

The Berlin wall of webdesign is crumbling and has fallen down in some places already. Web designers can use font faces now in a way that is simple. No more barriers of having to use javascript or flash, this will shape the design of the web in the coming months and years.

Hope you like the font face I have chosen. :)