P.S. Clicking on a thousand links to find the Font I want doesn’t cut it. The place where I created my “Debbie” logo had a gallery so I could scan and find the Font I wanted, and then type in my name and wha-la?!
Have you tried fontsquirrel.com? You can’t choose a color or the dimensions, however, but they have fonts with licensing options that allow you to use whatever font they have on the site on your commercial and non-commercial projects.
Google webfonts give you a few more options in selecting your preferred font, but here you also won’t get the option to choose a color.
You’d really get the most control by downloading whatever font you’ve choosen and then modify the leading, kerning, color and anything else you deem important with a graphics editor, optimize it, and upload it. Every other method would be inferior in terms of control and quality imo.
Thanks for the responses, but I was hoping to avoid downloading anything. (What exactly does that mean/do anyway?!) :-/
What I did before was just type in “Debbie” and the generator site I was at generated my name in whatever font, and then I did a screen-capture on my make and made a 220px x 36px “dummy” Logo for my test site. (That’s good enough for my needs right now.)
If you just want to do a screen capture, then you can use both of the links I gave above. Both sites allow you to type in your text and have it display on screen at whatever text size you want. However, I strongly recommend against just doing a screen capture and using that as your logo.
As for downloading a font… Do you have experience downloading files, any files? If so, that’s exactly the same thing. You download the font of your choice (the download links are provided on each font’s page), then unzip it, and open the font file. When you do that in OS X, you’ll be asked whether you’d like to install that font. If you click “install”, then this font will be made available for you to use in all of your programmes, be it the text editor, a graphics programme, code editor, and so on. In other words, you simply extend your font library by one font.
Isn’t this were DeathShadow comes in and says something like, “Installed fonts are <insert favorite body fluid> and should be used for a bizillion reasons?!”
If I pick a cool Google Font, but my visitors don’t have it or have a slow connection and can’t download it, doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
Also, if I wanted to use a Fancy Font for something like a Logo, would it be better to Photoshop/Illustrator it and make an image?
In terms of deleting fonts, the only danger is that you delete any ‘system fonts’ that the computer depends on. But there’s no problem deleting any fonts that you’ve installed yourself.
I’d say that’s unlikely. But even if the font doesn’t download, you should have a similar font(s) set in the CSS as a fallback.
Also be warned that, in my experience at least, Google fonts are a bit flaky. I’ve never gotten them to work cross browser, so have walked away from the entirely. FontSquirrel ones are great in my experience.
Also, if I wanted to use a Fancy Font for something like a Logo, would it be better to Photoshop/Illustrator it and make an image?
I would tend to do that, but there is a lot of interest in using fonts for logos and icons these days. There are more to do with icons, but the same principle applies (I think, at least):
Thankfully, we all have varying opinions. Use standard system fonts for your logo or use non-standard fonts. It’s your choice.
Just to make it clear, I suggested that you download the font for your logo because your logo does not make use of a standard system font. Instead of screen capturing whatever you’ve typed on the screen, I recommended that you downloaded the font instead and then opened up your graphics programme to create your logo with the installed font, editing the leading, kerning, etc. to your heart’s content, then optimizing it (save it as an image) and uploading your logo in an image format.
This has nothing to do with using webfonts on a site. That’s a different beast and wouldn’t make sense when you just want to use the font in one instance (logo).
