I am currently working on a project which for political reasons will not be using a lot of illustrations. The reason is that illustrations tend to communicate particular norms and values, as well as being open for ambigous interpretations. For a website on a complex and politically sensitive topic, which does not want to be perceived to express any partisan views, it may be smart to stay away from non-abstract graphics which can be interpreded to carry meaning that was not intended.
So, based on these restrictions I am looking at using typography to make the website interesting and pleasing to the eye.
Finding the right Font
There are several nice tools online that helps you find and compare font types. Here are some of the ones I like.
flippingtypical lets you easily view and brows through the fonts you already have installed on your computer.
fontbrowser lets you brows through and preview a long list of font types
fontsquirrel and dafont are great places to download free fonts
Manipulating Typography with CSS
When you think of it there are surprisingly many aspects to typography that can be manipulated with CSS. Speckyboy.com has more information regarding CSS web safe fonts and font sizes in different measurement units. There are several tools available online for you to play around with these CSS settings. Below are some nice ones:
typechart provides charts and downloadable CSS for web safe fonts combined with various CSS font settings
fonttester lets you define several typographies, view them, and compare them side by side, and download the CSS
Manipulating Typography by Dynamic Image Replacement
If the CSS options for manipulating typography are too restrictive for your project there are several ways of using Javascript, Flash, or PHP to dynamically replace text in headers etc. with images depicting fancier fonts.
I will get back to this more in detail in a later article. Now I have to work on my typography website design
Expanding Font Options by Including Fonts on the Server Side
Instead of using techniques generating images to replace fonts, as mentioned above, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally.