Fonts
I’m amazed that Helvetica, a rather beautiful font, costs USD$741. I know fonts take a lot of time to make, and generally cost a lot of money (a conversation I had with Keith Packard sometime in 2004 cemented this into my head). Recently, I read in Monocle about Japanese font-maker Morisawa and figured that fonts are truly, really expensive.
Apple ships Helvetica. But as a “dfont” package. Good thing there’s a utility called DfontSplitter (Windows and MacOSX only). It allows you to extract the font as a TTF. But legally, you might not be able to use it for Web Embedding either.
Today, I discovered Cufón (source). Its a simple web utility – upload the font, and it generates the font in a format, and then there’s a little rendering engine that pops out in JavaScript for your usage. Very handy. Now websites can have embedded fonts, and things start looking the way you designed them to look.
As an aside, I used to generate favicon’s using an image editor. Nowadays, it seems like you might as well just move to the web – one less use for desktop software – use the favicon.ico Generator.
If you want to avoid copyright violations, take a look at the 18 fonts Google just started giving away:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/introduc…
Also a Web font loader open-source move:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/introduc…
Colin, you should be using WOFF, no?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Open_Font_Format
Dude you should totally watch Helvetica: The Movie!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)
Consider looking into http://code.google.com/webfonts too ;)