bowdenweb

I’ve been playing around with @font-face and multiple font-weights mainly to find a font or two whose family is extensive enough to use in multiple weights. I’ve found some great ones, but there are some things I’ve noticed between the worlds of webdev and typography that could use some ironing out. Many Font Families that appear to have multiple font-family‘s, are actually entirely different Families themselves. Along the lines of css, different font-weights are still tied to the same font-family. So basically, font:400 Arial is Arial and font:700 Arial is Arial Bold. What I’ve noticed is that most of the Families are really like Super Families, whereas Arial will have a few weights, and Arial Bold will have a few weights as well. Some mesh well regardless, but some do not, and more importantly it’s really difficult to find font-family‘s that span at least half the font-weight‘s.

To add further difficulty within the Super Families, I noticed alot of new acronyms/abbreviations in the Font Names which I am completely unfamiliar with. I am sure they are sound and hold weight in the Design world, but they are all new to me. I came across the table below in pdf format and thought that I’d share it in nice, tasty, searchable html to get the word out.

You can read more and download the pdf from the illustrious fontshop.com