EXTRA CREDIT: OpenType features and the web

I ran across an article on the TypeKit Practice blog about OpenType features and how to enable and use them on the web.

OpenType features are more than just fancy swashes, they’re the superpowers of fonts! The best typefaces are full of sophisticated reasoning and little surprises — things that are often integral to the design of the typeface itself, or that help it work better for specific typesetting tasks. Being a graphic design student, I can appreciate the nuances of ligatures and old style numbers, and have always struggled to bring these same features from print over to the web.

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Top ten overused fonts on the web

Font ReachI recently read an article on Fast Company Design blog about a new site called FontReach that shows the most used fonts on the web. Fontreach was created by Jason Chen and Jesse Chase of Digital Ocean after they started looking for a new typeface for their website. They thought the font they chose was overused, but they needed data. No tool like FontReach existed, so they created it.

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Displaying ligatures on the web with CSS

Screenshot 2015-10-12 00.02.41

Those of us in graphic design are in the know about type features such as ligatures. In typography, a ligature occurs where two or more letters are joined as a single glyph in fonts that support them. A good example of a ligature is the lowercase f and the lowercase i characters. They can be displayed separately, but some fonts contain a ligature glyph of the f and i joined as fi.

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