Blueprint for Design

A subtle change has been made to the look of our blog.  Did you notice when you looked at it today?  The change is in the fonts used for the headings on our site.  They’re different.  Recently, I came across a company/website called Typekit that allows you to use fonts from their type foundry (legally) on your site.  It’s simple to use and looks pretty cool.  The best part is the ability to use nonstandard fonts to make a site look better.

First, you need to sign up for an account at www.typekit.com.  There is a free version and several different paid options.  For the Blueprint for Design site I chose the free version which places a fairly unobtrusive link in the bottom right of the browser window.  Check it out down there.  Clicking it will first take you to a page that shows the font(s) we are using. Then, obviously, it has links to their site.  I like that it doesn’t take the browser right to Typekit’s website.  It actually provides some useful information, then gives the user the option to proceed further.

Next, for our site, since we use WordPress, I simply installed the Typekit plug-in and added the embed code provided by Typekit’s website.

In our case, I wanted to change every bit of text that had the <h2> selector associated with it.  So, I chose the font I wanted, told it that the selector was <h2>, hit publish and presto, our site had the new font.  It took only 5 minutes to set up.

Here are a few screen shots of the font selection portion of the site and the editor. (Click images to view larger.)