Noticed this font, Lato, and want to remember to use it for something.


- jim 3-05-2013 1:17 pm

Nice, similar to Gill Sans but less quirky for web use.
- adman 3-05-2013 3:32 pm


Looks great at large point sizes I think. Love Gill Sans too (got this from MB who I believe uses it quite a bit) but I don't think there are any free versions to use on web pages, and most likely only Mac users will have it installed by default.
- jim 3-05-2013 3:35 pm


From their site: @font-face is a css rule which allows you to download a particular font from your server to render a webpage if the user hasn't got that font installed. I may be getting in over my head here.
- adman 3-05-2013 4:26 pm


@font-face works with a few caveats. The bigger issue here is cost. If it's not on the users computer already, and it's not free like Google Web Fonts (where they even host them for free,) then it's going to cost. That Gill Sans will cost you $90/year for (I believe) every website you use it on, and that's for 10,000 pageviews / month. Cost goes up from there with traffic. Not a huge deal if you a designing a site for a couple grand, but hard just to screw around with it.

Note that @font-face doesn't install the font on the users computer. The font is downloaded from their servers to be rendered in the browser every time a page is requested by any user (even if they've been to the page before and downloaded it previously.)

As with most things client side, Paul Irish is the authority. If you're interested, his article Bulletproof @font-face implementation lays out all the many issues and gives the best (if certainly not most concise) way to include fonts using @font-face.
- jim 3-05-2013 6:02 pm


Thanks for the articl. I know just enough to get in trouble.
- adman 3-05-2013 10:12 pm





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