What a difference a font makes

I fell in love with a font today, and I had to buy it. Now my site looks like this. Still some styling work to do, but it’s looking a lot cuter than it was.

The font in question is called Trilby, and it is generously made available to students for educational purposes for free by its creator, David Jonathon Ross, whose work is really beautiful. While I was at his site, I ended up signing up to his Font of the Month club. The issue of font licences got me thinking that when I push this project to GitHub, the font files will be right there for anyone to see and steal, which this article seems to confirm. How is an honest typographer supposed to make a living? I decided to add them to my gitignore file so they won’t be pushed with the project. I’ll have to see later if this causes deployment problems.

Along the way I also learnt about the font face CSS rule (and by “learn about” I mostly mean “discovered I can copy and paste it into my code and it works”, which when it comes to CSS is enough for me.)