Simplified Dynamic Text Replacement

What Happened To Your Font Face?

If you haven’t checked out Cufon and how seamlessly it generates dynamically replaced text you should really take a few minutes and check it out.

The idea behind dynamically replaced text is to allow your website or blog to display a particular font type for actual inline text so that the copy meshes better with your overall design – which is pretty flippin’ sweet for web designers with OCD for junk like that.

Dynamic text replacement (DTR) has been around for a while now, but most of the initial solutions took a fair amount of work to muscle into place and the end results weren’t always what you might have hoped for. But Cufon makes implementation so easy it’s not even fair to the other methods. For real.

Hold On One Minute There Slick

But even with how slick Cufon works it’s important to keep some things in mind before you run off and dynamically replace the shit out of all the copy on your blog.

First and foremost, a huge reason why we haven’t been able to embed any font type we want on our sites is all due to licensing. It sounds crazy to some, but a lot of people spend their time creating type faces and put a great deal of work into them, so it’s more than fair to them that type faces are licensed and controlled. Be sure to check the licensing of the font you’re looking to use via DTR and make sure it’s cool.

Not all type faces should be used for large blocks of copy. Even though you might love a certain font and it matches your design perfectly, keep in mind that people will be reading (or trying to read) the copy on your site. If the font is to chunky, ornate or out of control, it might frustrate or downright piss people off and drive them away. So just like booze and comfort food, make sure to use moderation.

Personally I would limit DTR to headers and very small blocks of copy. It might be a mistake to apply the font to the entire site. Another thing: maybe your site is fine using a web-safe font. There’s nothing wrong with Arial or Times New Roman and it’s possible that your site may not need DTR. Just because the tool is available doesn’t mean you NEED to use it.

   

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