One of the reasons I came over to Squarespace’s hosting for this blog, was that their system had excellent tools for manipulating the CSS online and seeing the changes live. It made it worth paying for hosting again.

And man, have I ever been manipulating the layout over here.

If you’ve been reading me via the RSS feed alone, please pop over to the page itself to see how things have changed.

I’ve extended the theme of the ComicsPundit logo to the type setting of the entire page. Part of it in a typewriter like font, part of it in a comic book lettering font.

However, to achieve that look for all the text on this blog, I’ve made use of some CSS features that aren’t fully implemented in all browsers yet.

The Typeset font varies depending on what fonts you have installed on your machine. If you have American Typewriter installed on your machine, that is what displays here. Otherwise it defaults to Courier, an acceptable substitute, though not as good looking. You only need American Typewriter Medium & Bold fonts for this site. If you want to buy them they available here and here

This technology is the use of web fonts. Essentially the stylesheet has references to TrueType files on the servers, that when needed, are downloaded and cached by your browser. The current version of Safari (3.2) supports this, as will the next version (3.5) of Firefox (the current Beta version of 3.1also supports it). Other browsers will be following shortly.

The good news this that the font I use for comic book lettering “Mighty Zeo 2.0” is a free font for you to download and install on your computer. Without one of these browsers or having the font installed, various headers will display in Comic Sans (a font that has become rather trendy to hate), and the text in posts will display in one of the common sans serif fonts.

Mind you, this is method of web font embedding is a somewhat controversial thing in the typography world, as font vendors are very worried that this method of font use exposes font files to easily being pirated (to which artists & photographers are saying, “welcome to our world.”)

This is why I didn’t take advantage of web fonts on this site until I got permission to use such a font from it’s maker, as few user licenses clearly address this kind of use, and many explicitly prohibit this.

Therefore, I would like to thank Nate Piekos of Blambot Comic Fonts & Lettering for permitting me to do this. He has lots of great fonts, at good prices and quite a few which are free for non-commercial use.

Admittably, font embedding is not universally embraced by all browser makers, and older browsers will still be out there for quite a while, so I wouldn’t consider font embedding for any professional websites, but for my personal blog, I’m willing to go out on the leading edge for fun.

By the way, if the Mighty Zeo font use in the posts is too much for anyone, please let me know. I think I’ve got the line spacing and padding to where there’s just enough white space to make this an attractive layout, but I could be wrong and appreciate your input.