When text is rendered by a computer, sometimes characters are displayed as “tofu.” They are little boxes to indicate your device doesn’t have a font to display the text.

Google has been developing a font family called Noto, which aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel. Noto is Google’s answer to tofu. The name noto is to convey the idea that Google’s goal is to see “no more tofu.” Noto has multiple styles and weights, and is freely available to all.

Marvin Visions is a more modern and consistent reinterpretation of Marvin, a typeface originally designed by Michael Chave in 1969 and published by Face Photosetting. It has been revived by Mathieu Triay for the identity of Visions, a new science fiction magazine that aims to be a literary introduction to the genre, mixing classic texts with new writing.

This typeface speaks to me.

Nate Berkopec’s article is chock full of useful information, but I was particularly taken by his framing of a developer’s job (emphasis his):

As developers, our job isn’t to tell the designers “Hey, you’re dumb for including over 500KB of WebFonts in your design!”. That’s not their job. As performance-minded web developers, our job is to deliver the designer’s vision in the most performant way possible.

Equally interesting, but more technically-focused, is the rundown of how Google Fonts takes advantage of the unicode-range property to deliver smaller fonts.

The unicode-range property describes what characters the font supports. […] By telling the browser what characters the font supports, the browser can look at the page, note what characters the page uses, and then only download the fonts it needs to display the characters actually on the page.

Brilliant. I switched to serving fonts from Google and trimmed 45–70 kilobytes from my homepage. Your mileage may vary, but… not bad.

The State of Web Type is a project by Bram Stein to collate and display up-to-date browser support data for web fonts & typographic features on the web.

Compatibility tables for default local fonts.

Serious efforts are being made to get more typeface choices on the web to enhance web typography. Still, most of us prefer web-safe fonts like: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman and Arial. Though choices are limited, yet the number can be increased by exploring other pre-installed fonts.

swissted is an ongoing project by graphic designer mike joyce, owner of stereotype design in new york city. drawing from his love of punk rock and swiss modernism, two movements that have (almost) nothing to do with one another, mike has redesigned vintage punk, hardcore, and indie rock show flyers into international typographic style posters. each design is set in berthold akzidenz grotesk medium, all lowercase. many of these posters are now available for sale in three different sizes at print-process. every single one of these shows actually happened.

This is the way the code should have been all along. Clean, clear and simple.

Easily create bundles of beautifully matching, free web fonts, with failsafe font stacks to back them up. Including ready-to-go CSS code!

We’re done with the tired old fontstacks of yesteryear. Enough with the limitations of the web, we won’t have it. It’s time to raise our standards. Here, you’ll find only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts.

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR.