Up until recently, typography has been the poor step-child of web design. That has definitely changed!

What you are seeing on this website is the result of cufón from http://cufon.shoqolate.com/ — where you can generate a JavaScript file for any font you can legally use on a website and a Drupal module located at http://drupal.org/project/cufon ! Yes, this is the good stuff!

Typography was relegated to images in the first 10 years of my web designing career. If I had to have absolute control over my type in headings and captions then I had one choice: a graphic. Or, I could accept the limitations of rendering fonts as close to my original intent as possible (often not very, unless I limited myself to the standard fonts).

A few years ago, a text-replacement tool called SiFR made the rounds, and I gave it a go in a few instances, but it was unwieldy and, natch, required Flash. I'm not opposed to Flash (my iPhone is, unfortunately), but it was thanks to JAM of http://www.neardark.com that I heard of cufón.

And today, thanks to Zach Meyer, I heard about the iQ font from a marketing campaign by Toyota of Belgium/Netherlands (I drive a Toyota, so I had to check it out). And I checked out http://nl.toyota.be/cars/new_cars/iq/iq_font.aspx where a really cool movie showed how the font was generated.

And once I converted the free iQ font, downloaded the cufón Drupal module and installed the JS, I could create the CSS selector as a reference for cufón to replace the text of each word with the VML outlines generated by the JavaScript. Then, what you see here is the result! Typography that is inline and searchable (unlike a graphic), and can be edited in the CMS (also unlike a graphic)!

This is truly the good stuff! No going back now!