Interactive Llama

To the designer, it’s a pain only using Arial and Times New Roman for headlines (well, the MacHead designers are probably using Helvetica and Times, but I regress. . .) , so one uses images. The problem is that images are static unless you have an image generation script package installed on your web server to create images on-the-fly.

So what’s one to do?

A friend of mine actually sent me a link to Mike Davidson’s site on sIFR 2.0 (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) two years ago. I had forgotten about it until my creative director wanted a headline in a pixel font in a database driven site.

The concept

sIFR can replace short amounts of text with text rendered in the typeface you choose–whether or not your users have the font installed on their computer. A flash movie is created on the client side and uses JavaScript to pass text to it from the HTML (that’s correct, no coding the text twice). That means with a few lines of Javascript, you can use any fancy font you want for headlines and pullout quotes.

–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com