After years of nagging, my sister Sarah is allowing me to upgrade their flash-based website (that I built) to modern standards. They’ve got some great new photos and I just wanted to share this one with you. Check them out at:sassafrasgardens.com.

With the launch of the new spigotdesign.com site I was very excited about the possibilities of using @font-face to spice up the typography on the site. Typekit was to be my weapon of choice here but it turns out that it’s still unusable (for now).

Dejected, I went back to the old web-safe font stack and resigned myself to be ok with it. Then one fine day,  this article, Opera loves my webfont showed up in my feedreader, which pointed me to www.fontsquirrel.com as a way of rolling your own @font-face stacks.

FontSquirrel claims to offer “Only the best commercial-use free fonts” in an “easy to use format.” They’ve gathered what they feel are the best free fonts out there that have been licensed for use commercially on the web, and packaged them up into ‘@font-face kits.’

Each @font-face font kit come with:

• Original TrueType or OpenType Fonts for Firefox 3.5+ , Opera 10+, Safari 3.1+, Chrome 4.0.249.4+
• EOT fonts for Internet Explorer 4+
• Demo.html and stylesheet.css so you can get going fast

As great as the font kits are, the highlight of the site for me is the @font-face Generator, which allows you to upload your own fonts (provided they are properly licensed) and the system will generate a full kit, complete with all the web fonts you’ll need and the css code. Upload the fonts to your server, place the code into your stylesheet, and away you go!

Cross browser/OS font rendering

The real test is how well the fonts render across browsers and operating systems. I’m very happy to say that the fonts FontSquirrel generates render beautifully in every browser I’ve tested. And that was that, I was a FontSquirrel convert.

What do you think?

These fonts render great on every system I’ve tested, but I’m still interested in what you think. Do the fonts on this site render ok for you? If not I’d love to see a screenshot and a rundown of the system you’re using.

For those who liked the site just fine the way it was, check out the link on the home page that will allow you to switch it back (and forth). Give it a click and you’ll be taken back to the dark design, and should remain that way the next time you happen to grace these pages again.

The new design also sports a special font called “Fontin Sans” from font designer Jos Buivenga (Exljbris Font Foundry). Exljbris has allowed @font-face embedding of many of their fonts into websites. Unfortunately, unless you’re viewing this site with Safari, you’ll be seeing good old Helvetica instead, as @font-face support is very thin at the moment. The good news is that the next versions of Firefox and Opera will be supporting it. As for Internet Explorer… well, who knows…

Any feedback would be well appreciated, especially if you find a bug.

From a design standpoint, however, drop-down menus are an excellent feature because they help clean up a busy layout. If structured correctly, drop-down menus can be a great navigation tool, while still being a usable and attractive design feature.

After reading the article, I may think so too.

If you want it done right, do it yourself

This, for most of my life, has been my motto. The person you pay to do a thing for you, will never, never care as much about that thing as you do, right? Doing things yourself also brings skills you never would have had otherwise. Plumbing a bathroom, changing the clutch in a car and building my own split-board are skills I now possess. 

A DIY mini-story

Our first house was a ‘fixer-upper.’ We gutted the thing, from the ceiling to the floors, even knocked out a wall or two.  For nearly two years we lived in a constant state of remodel. When we got around to hanging the sheetrock back up, it felt like we were finally starting to get somewhere. It took me two weeks to hang it, on a nights and weekends basis. And then came time to apply the ‘mud.’ This is a skill I thought I most certainly would excel at, since it’s more art and finesse than brute force labor. Well not so fast there, partner.  I actually really stink at it. When you watch a pro, it looks so easy and quick. I, on the other hand, found myself going over the same area again and again in failed attempts at getting it smooth. After two weeks trying, I gave up and called in the cavalry. A pro agreed to finish the job for $400 – and he had it done in two days, while I was at work. 

If you want it done right, hire an expert

As I was paying the sheetrock pro, he said to me, “You should have called me sooner, I would have hung the sheetrock too for another $200.”

What?

He did a better job, did it faster – and would have saved me even more time and heartache had I called him sooner. Here’s where you see a lightbulb pop up over my head. I had my first lesson in a motto I’ve come to call:

Let the experts do what the experts do.

I still do quite a bit of DIY stuff – I still haven’t taken my car into a shop – but these days I pick and choose what I can do myself, and what might be better left to an expert. 

Things to consider in DIY vs the Expert

It’s usually pretty easy to decide which way to go when I consider these two things:

1. How steep is the learning curve for the task
2. Is my time better spent doing my real job

If the task is only going to take an afternoon to figure out, or if the ‘error’ portion of trial and error won’t cost too much time and effort, then I’ll tackle the task myself. This is usually the case, as I’m not afraid to fail at something, learn from the mistakes, and get it right the second time. 

If, however, I can hire an expert, pay them say, half of my hourly rate, then it’s time to let the experts do what the experts do, every time. I save myself the trouble, the task is done right and probably in half the time.

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