Thursday, April 08, 2010

Font Rendering

I’m frequently talking in class about what a designer can count on, and what’s out of our control. In web development, fonts are a good example. Even as you specify fonts, you cannot necessarily assume that the viewer’s machine has those font installed. Or, that they will render similarly - particularly given the differences of platform and browser. I think the image below from a post at The Small Wave makes the differences clear. Both of these render form the same code, but obviously appear different:

Now I know that some will argue that I’m just trying to applaud the Mac here - but I’m really not trying to do that. This is all about being able to see the fact that fonts render differently on different machines and/or browsers.