Freelance Designer Ben Harrison provides website design for clients across Ayrshire, Glasgow and beyond.
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Cufon - Font replacement without Flash Bang Wollop

After noticing a few blog posts and people tweeting about Cufón, I finally decided to take a closer look.

Cufón allows you to replace text element on your web page with "rich" fonts that normally wouldn't be recommended outside of the web-safe list.

After having a quick read over the website, it seemed a bit too simple.

  1. Cufónize* your font,
  2. Download the generated javascript file,
  3. Include the Cufón javascript file and your own font JS file,
  4. List the element in the <head> you want to replace (h1, h3 etc)

...and it should be working!

I've used SIFR, the similar Flash-based font replacement technique and found it to be great but a pain to setup. Plus, on two websites I built, it seems to fail to load intermittently, which is very annoying.

Comparing the setup time for both techniques, I spent (at the most) a quarter of the time on Cufón as I would have done with SIFR. I've just used it on two websites, which are hopefully launching soon. 

Outside of the usual SIFR flash-player problems, the terror of trying to get an opaque background that worked in every browser, Cufón seems to be great on the surface: it just works.

* Sorry, I'm sure it's not called Cufonize. It just sounded cool.

— Posted by Ben (Jul 6, 09:00 AM)

 

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