I don’t often feature websites on here. I guess the whole web font “revolution” of the last two years has sent designers into a flurry of experimentation and the results are often a little underwhelming.
People like Jason Santa Maria and Trent Walton have been nudging us in the right direction, showing us the power that this culmination of typographic awareness, innovation and browser support holds. As we all know, with great power comes great responsibility, and in exploring this new frontier, best practices have been something of a grey area.
But hey, let’s not forget the reason we designers got all excited about the prospect of web fonts in the first place: the ability to use real fonts for typographic design instead of replacing text with images!
Without analysing the design of Cast Iron Design Company‘s website, I simply want to commend them on taking advantage of this ability. The design duo from Tucson, Arizona has made liberal use of web fonts (via Typekit) and CSS3 techniques throughout.
I was a little disappointed though, to find that the header design (which differs from page to page) makes use of image replacement instead of real fonts. Come on guys, you have taken it this far, now how about those headers?
*throws down the gauntlet…*
To see it for yourself, go to Cast Iron Design Company.
When we first started on the site we had reasons to use images for the header. We wanted to have a large pool of randomized eclectic headers with more fonts used than you could find on web font services. We also wanted to add texture to them, and have the hover image fade effect. It does seem odd now that the site is complete because we ended up using web fonts in the content area way more consistently than we thought we would. It’s a very fair point to make, and if we weren’t burnt out on this design (and already looking forward to a complete redesign) we would probably redo the header. Thank you, we appreciate the write up and compliments, and even the constructive critique.
Hi Richard, thanks for dropping by. I get what you’re saying about being burned out on the design. As you say, there’s always the next version to look forward to. Keep up the good work!