Fontfacer: An Easy Typography Solution for Web Design

You can never go wrong using the right kind of typography for web design projects. Some web designers believe that fonts can make about half of their user interfaces stylish and meaningful, and they are probably right in this regard. For a lot of design professionals, applying font to their projects means using Google Fonts, which is a massive repository of typefaces for the web that keeps getting larger, but this requires making yet another external server call.

Web development professionals have noticed that modern websites suffer from too many server calls and external dependencies to anything from JavaScript and CSS libraries to simple fonts. Not only can this have a detrimental effect on page loading speeds; there is also the matter of subjecting visitors to third parties that will drop their own cookie and behavioral tracking elements in order to gather data. While you can trust the security of font repositories such as Google, there is the matter of making fonts available to visitors in offline mode.

Fontfacer is a web app that enables you to generate the necessary CSS rules for you to host any font on the server where your web design project resides. As long as the font files of your project have traditional naming convention, you can upload it to Fontfacer and get the CSS rules you need. Once you complete the upload, the web app will display what you; simply copy and paste the output into your code.

Fontfacer is especially useful for the development of iOS projects, because the iOS Simulator runs in offline mode. With Fontfacer, you can easily host the relevant fonts in an application or static file, and you will not need to make an additional request to a third-party API when you need to test font fallback in iOS.

There are some other options for building typeface-specific style sheets on your server, but Fontfacer is the easiest to use. After you've generated the font rules, you'll need to go back into your source code and add an internal server call to the font rules. Keeping server calls down to a minimum should be a new web development standard. For more information click here https://www.fontfacer.io/.