was reading this article over at Smashing Magazine on Web Design trends for 2009 and it mentioned the use of font replacement. Stuck in my own little world of sans-serifs, I’d been happy enough with verdana but my fingers felt itchy… A lot of designers would probably love to have the flexibility of type on the web that they get when designing for other media.

Happily, there’s a couple of ways to get flowery, flowing letters without using any sort of images or graphics. Firstly there’s the Flash option of sIFR but I’m pretty against using Flash unless absolutely necessary.

A nicer option is Typeface. It allows you to convert true type fonts into a javascript file that is included on your page. Then you can use this font-family in your CSS for any page element. Here’s an example to show you what I mean (oh boo not working property, check the other link).

Nice, isn’t it.

I finally got around to uploading a presentation I did on optimising techniques for websites from the last Brisbane web design meetup. So here it is on slideshare.

And speaking of web design, here’s something I thought was too good not to share: a Javascript port for the Processing visualisation language, by John Resig: Processing-js. Basically, it allows for dynamic visual rendering in the browser using the canvas element via javascript. The canvas element is a low level C software renderer, similar in function to Flash, and since Actionscript and Javascript are functionally pretty similar, it has the potential to basically replace Flash/actionscript. Check out the demos to see it in action.

Note: It only works in browsers that support the Canvas element, ie. not IE…

Another very cool implementation of the canvas element is a playable, javascript version of super mario embedded in a png file - look ma, no Flash! This guy has some pretty impressive code experimentations.

Files on the Sporepedia use a similar technique to embed all the 3D data for the model in the alpha channel of a png image, so the image essentially becomes the datafile as well.

Anyway, I tend to get pretty excited by the prospect of some of these projects. It’s so good to see the innovative things people come up with and to have my own tinker with them, even though I’m not that good of a coder (though I try). Anyone else interested in this stuff?

Also: In relation to that web presentation, here is a great tool for optimising the client-side of websites—SmartOptimizer. It caches, gzips, minifies and collates js, css etc and I’m using it on this site to get a L337 YSlow score of 89. Go check it out.