Arial's days are numbered, and we should all celebrate. Come learn about the evolution of web font embedding, how it works, what it can do for your site and your users, and how to make the most of the biggest advance in design for the web since the deprecation of the blink tag.
Drupal's evolution has drastically changed the way web sites are made and managed. But we're still looking at a million pages of Arial - completely undermining the money and effort invested in developing brands and identity. Between Windows, Mac and the various flavors of Unix and Linux it leaves us with about a dozen fonts we can reasonably rely on being present. iPhones have more, but still only represent a fraction of the web browsing public, and the fastest growing segment of the market is Android... which has only 3 fonts resident in the system. Enter: web fonts. With thousands of fonts that can easily be embedded and work in virtually all modern browsers from desktops to mobile devices, the opportunities abound to provide vastly improved experience with more consistency and quality than ever before.
Numerous web font services have launched in the past year, and enormous effort has gone into improving the quality of fonts from many vendors specifically for on-screen use. Some even support API's enabling development of modules for Drupal to enable font selection and assignment to CSS selectors right in the browser interface. We'll also cover topics like how to manage the appearance of your site while the fonts are loading (it's easier than you think).
Find out how the platforms work, how to most effectively integrate them and learn about performance, tuning and even what you can do for devices that can't load them at all. We'll even cover some advanced features for non-Latin character sets like font-subsetting from http://webfonts.fonts.com (this is a big one).
22nd–26th August 2011