On our site we have to show a list of fonts available for imprinting invitations. Right now we typed up the list with all the different fonts and saved them as a JPEG to display on our site. The problem is they look horrible and you can’t really tell what they look like. Does any one have a solution to this problem?
Hello GraphicsEtc,
do you have a URL?
Why are you using such a large image? And you’re forcing it to be smaller, so naturally they are distorted and blurry.
I’d resize the whole thing properly, i.e. using smaller unit sizes for them instead of shrinking the raster image, then save them in a lossless format such as PNG.
Wow, I have to agree with Kohoutek. They look scrungy on my little old monitor, God only knows what they look like on that big honking monitor she has. 
I’d make a small PNG for each separate font and display it normally, with a text header or paragraph underneath identifying each font. Instead of just the font face name in the typeface, I’d use one of the standard phrases such as “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or “Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz,” and a string of single digits, 0-9. That way the client can see how all the letters and numbers look in the font, not just the few in the font name. (How well can you judge, say, Arial as a font when you only get to see four letters – a, r, i, and l?) And don’t forget that the client needs to see both upper- and lower-case letters.
Hmmm, this could get complicated. I could easily see you going to a simple list of fonts, or perhaps small illustrative images, with lightboxes allowing the user to see a larger text display in the selected font in a separate display on hover or click.
As Max said, it might be worth having a preview button which uses a lightbox to provide a “to-scale” image of the item in question. What’s going on is you resized the image and therefore the quality was reduced to skew and push everything together. Unfortunately the only way around it would be to use a better graphics tool to scale everything down… that and it may be worth offering the text inside the cards (etc) on the website itself - remember that not everyone can see images, I’m sure you’ll have some people with poor vision who might want to buy something too, so having textual contents is a must.
Even when you view the full-size image, it still doesn’t look all that great. I might even suggest remaking the preview image and saving it as a higher resolution jpg or png file, then simply linking to the image or providing a thumbnail they can click instead of having that (no offense) ugly resizing issue. Just my two cents.