Web Design: Use Cufon For Text Replacement

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:13:00 GMT

Back in March we discussed how to use FLIR (Facelift Image Replacement) as one way to replace text and use any font on your website. FLIR is a great alternative to sIFR that does not require Flash, but there are some good alternatives - namely, Cufon.

Unlike sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) Cufon requires no plugins. Cufon consists of two individual parts - a font generator (which converts fonts to a proprietary format) and a rendering engine written in Javacript.

The font generation is essentially just a web-based interface to FontForge (an outline font editor that lets designers create postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap fonts, or edit existing ones, which allows for the conversion from one format to another).

The generator (check an online version here) builds a custom FontForge script based on user input and then runs it, saving the result as an SVG font. The SVG font is then parsed and SVG paths are converted to VML paths. The resulting document is then converted into JSON with a mix of functional JavaScript. The process is then repeated for the rest of the fonts given to the generator and the resulting JavaScript file is sent back to the client with a distinctive filename.

SuCasa: Design Marketplace

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:02:00 GMT

Web designers often work in a vacuum, but it doesn't have to be that way. WebAssist, makers of eCommerce and productivity extensions (software add-ons) for Adobe products announced the launch of SuCasa, an online template marketplace and community for anyone to share, buy, or sell low-cost website templates, page layouts and CSS menues.

There are far too few organized services available like SuCasa. The destination could prove to be helpful for designers looking for inspiration, developers that don't want to invest in web design, and website owners looking for a freshening up of their site. Most impressive to me is that SuCasa provides Web designers an additional revenue stream.

The community is free to join and members are able to upload template to share or sell immediately, keeping 90 percent of the sale price.

“SuCasa delivers a ‘one-stop shop’ for web designers to sell and exchange their diverse and professional web designs to each other and to businesses, as well as individuals, looking to enhance their Web presence,” said Michael Lekse, Vice President Sales, WebAssist.

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Web Design: Use Cufon For Text Replacement

SuCasa: Design Marketplace