Use Font Squirrel for alternate type faces

Here in the heart of the enterprise software market, fonts come in two flavors: serif (Times) and sans (Arial). It's hard to make a big visual change in any UI without also making changes to the typography. Luckily, we're moving into an era where alternate type faces are becoming trivial to add to your design.

SIFR and FaceLift are a couple of tools to do this in web pages today, but they're not exactly easy to use. I still can't figure out why SIFR text is showing up tiny in Safari for my site Rated-Best.org. But with the release of Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4, mainstream browsers are now starting to support @font-face. Here's a nice example page using @font-face.

Plus at my company, teams are using Adobe Flex and Air to develop rich apps that span web and desktop, and run on Mac and Windows. This gives us the ability to embed alternate fonts in these rich apps.

This is where Font Squirrel comes in. It's a great resource for designers at companies where you want to explore alternate typography, but you don't want to burn any capital on purchasing font licenses. These fonts are free to use for commercial applications. Check them out, use them in your projects, and if things go well, use that success as a way to move up to a broader palette of paid-license fonts.