by Kris on Monday, May 24th, 2010 | 
No Comments | Tags: Google
I was minding my own business after another lost weekend when I opened up my feedly after a few days and up popped a post from the Google Code Blog announcing the Google Font API and Font Directory. It looked pretty neat, so I decided to give it a closer look.
Using new browser support for web fonts as part of the CSS3 @font-face standard, what Google has put together an “API” of sorts makes it very simple to incorporate a set of open source fonts that have been commissioned and submitted to their directory. And when I say very simple, I mean it’s just doing the same thing than any web designer or developer has been doing for years: CSS. Here’s the painless 2-step process:
- Add a stylesheet reference using the
link tag in the head of your HTML document, pointing to the Google resource below and referencing the font name you want to use.
http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family={font-name}
font-family: 'Tangerine', serif;
That’s literally it, and you can use any of the dozen or so fonts in the Google Font Directory that will surely grow over time.
In Action
Wanting to try it out, I went ahead and threw the new markup over at my Kris and Cindy site as the site header text. Take a look:
All that is there for that just a normal H1 tag and the CSS referenced above. Comparing that to the graphic logo that I was using on the previous version of the site:
It has a different feel to it, but I still like it. Plus, the reference stylesheet that is required for the font I chose – Tangerine – is only 181 bytes in size. Compare that to the logo graphic that was originally 7KB, and you see quite a difference.
Plus, the fact that it’s hosted by Google means it’s their bandwidth (big whoop) but also that once a visitor caches that file for one site, it’s cached for all other sites that use it, too. That’s a bigger benefit in my book than just the bandwidth savings.
More Time to Play
It will be interesting to see just how many new fonts get added in the next few months, and where we might see some of these pop up around the web.
For me, I still need to find more time to play around with these, and there are a few other sites of mine that could use a little typography tweaking other than just site headers. Like anything else, it will be good to have some fun with this.
by Kris on Monday, November 17th, 2008 | No Comments | Tags: Flickr, Google, Ka'anapali Dreamin', Maui Photo Day Calendar
What an afternoon of random ideas. During a rather slow drive home from work, I started thinking about new site designs for Ka’anapali Dreamin’ and came up with a few goodies. After some quick browsing for inspiration and a handful of pencil sketches, I arrived at something woth throwing together in Photoshop.
Getting ready to fire up the laptop, I soon became distracted by yet another idea while looking at one corner in my office at home. You see, I have been a fan of the
Islands Gallery Day Calendar
for a few years now, and whenever I come across a day that features Hawaii, I put it on my wall.
As you can imagine, one would gather quite a few of these over the course of 3 years (I’m counting 39 so far, with a few of them practically duplicates). And in all of that time, I had yet to think of using my own photos to create an online version. But for whatever reason, today I did.
I already have a
Today’s Photos section of Ka’anapali Dreamin’ that features three different photos each day (albeit it on a rotation). The same three photos can also be found on the site’s
home page in the sidebar as a slideshow using the
Google AJAX Slideshow and a custom feed I put together.
I also already have a daily game called
Is It Maui? that features a new photo (via Flickr) each day that was taken on one of the islands of Hawaii. Each of these photos has a subtle (or sometimes obvious) hint in them that tips off which island it was taken on, and the object of this simple game is to guess whether it was taken on Maui or not, and if not, which island. I have to use additional photos from Flickr because all of mine are from Maui (and that would have just made for a pretty lame game otherwise).
Yet despite having those daily displays on the site today, I still have this urge to make something like this daily calendar just because I can probably do it in a day or two. There is, of course, the laborious task of going through and finding 365 pictures to use (I don’t plan on cheating and including the weekend as one photo). I have certainly taken my share of photos that I could use, but that part of this would still be very time consuming.
Then, there are the options of what I could do with it once it’s finished. Obviously, I’d find a home for it on the Ka’anapali Dreamin’ site somewhere (no doubt in the
Daily Maui section). I could also publish it as an RSS feed and style it for a Google Gadget that people can add to their iGoogle page (even if it’s just me). And as being an RSS feed, someone could also just add it to Google Reader and see a warm Maui photo everyday. And then maybe I could integrate it with Facebook, … well you get the idea.
I’ll probably have a working prototype up by the end of the night, and then I’ll see if I’m still as excited tomorrow about having to go through all those photos.
Stay tuned.
