Confession first: I’m a bit of a font nerd. I like letters. I came across a link to The Scriptorium, a site I hadn’t thought to visit for quite some time – a couple of years at least. They make gorgeous type, mainly historical and period-style stuff. The site is pretty historical itself, with lots of font tags and other such relics plus an annoying tendency to open every page in a new window, but the typefaces themselves are beautiful.

At some point since I stopped looking, they introduced a set of three freely downloadable web typefaces – a calligraphic style face, a variable width face which is almost but not quite sans serif, and a quite lovely fixed width face – for web designers to use on sites and encourage their visitors to download. “View Page Info” in Firefox tells me the page was last updated in January 2002, so I’m obviously a little behind the times here.

While I think the idea of expecting readers to download anything in order to view your site is very 1995, I do like the web fonts and seeing as this site is mostly for my own enjoyment and we’re all web developers here anyway, I’ve added them to my CSS font-family declarations. So I’ll now I can enjoy my site in a whole new typeface – they say a change is as good as a holiday – and any of you who have ever installed these fonts (they’re available in Mac and PC format, down the bottom of this page) can also enjoy my whimsy – and believe me, it really is very pretty. Everyone else can continue along as before.

The Scriptorium also has a set of fixed-width fonts for purchase. I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono at the moment in my code editors – pretty nerdy, hey! – but I really like the look of Scriptorium’s Angelus and it’s easily worth the $US18, so as soon as my credit card looks a little healthier I might give it a whirl.

So, if by any chance you have the web fonts or feel like installing them, please tell me what you think – are they cool or what? I think the rest of my site needs an update, now…