Macaroni Bros - Web Design, Advertising, New Media, Social Media, Digital Marketing

Four weeks ago we launched the Web Fonts Gallery, giving the community a place to share and get inspiration with works based on superior web typography achieved through @font-face embedding.

Even if we know that the @font-face phonomenon is really young we must notice that we received a lot of submissions that didn't use @font-face at all, even if we explained our requirements in the submission form.
A lot of websites were made using text replacement frameworks (like cufon and SIFR) , many other were simply using static images in place of text.

Having made a gallery dedicated to @font-face websites we had to reject a lot of nicely designed websites.

That leads us to a reflection. It seems that a lot of designers are not too involved into the technical layer of web design, or maybe most of them simply draw it in Photoshop then give their work to a markup expert which slices it up and writes HTML/CSS code.

At that stage it's probably too much complicated to convert a bitmap design into a @font-face design. It's a decision that must be made in the inception of a project, carefully choosing fonts based on screen readability, download times, licensing, costs.

I think that the more webdesign evolves (and we are approaching the HTML5 / CSS3 revolution) the more we need designers which can deal with arts and technologies, having an increasingly wide field of view.

HTML5 is opening a new world of design and interaction tools, while keeping them inside standards. We're beyond those black-box flash movies: everyone will be able to have a look at your code, even the most evil users: search engine bots.

So I think we need to start integrating knowledge of interface designers, artist, coders, building a shared consciousness of what really is the Web Renaissance that has just begun.