Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

Well. This guy seems to be good at doing graphics. I like the graphics in the thumbnail he put. I don't like the sites design in the portfolio thumbs, but I need to get the full site URL and display it on my screen to be sure.

I like how he presented himself and the website coding. There are two points, though:

1. Don't use images for Text. He can use cuffon or font-face

2. I need to click the thumb. Since the page doesn't showcase any particular design and coding skills then I need to check the websites he made.

Why the site is good, in my opinion? Because it's unique. Good designers now focus on clean and well designed portfolios with JavaScript effects and little text and information. This is something unique and original. It's different. If I want to hire the guy, then I'll check his portfolio (that's why I need to click the thumbs) and decide.

The industry's not quite to the point where you can get rid of text-as-images. @font-face is supported in maybe 50% of browser versions, requires several different font formats, and even if you get it to work uniformly, you still have to deal with licensing issues.

http://caniuse.com/#search=font-face

I agree you should prefer text to images of text, but sometimes you can't escape it. EDIT: And I agree that in this particular case, he could've just used appropriately-styled text. :)

@font-face actually has pretty incredible browser coverage:

Safari 5.03, IE 6-9, Firefox 3.6-4, Chrome 8, iOS 3.2-4.2, Android 2.2-2.3, Opera 11 (http://www.fontspring.com/blog/the-new-bulletproof-font-face...)

It does require different file formats, but these can be generated trivially:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

@font-face is pretty widespread, but licensing is a many-headed beast, it's true.

Typekit, however, has really extensive browser support (http://help.typekit.com/customer/portal/articles/6786-browse...) and, of course, appropriate licensing built in.

There's too many great solutions for web typography to have images be an acceptable solution these days.

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