The other day I was looking at this-here blog of mine and thinking about sprucing it up a bit. I have several other images I could use for the header, though I must admit I’m still smitten with the clean, crisp look of Buntzen Lake I have up there now. I could adopt a new theme but I blanch at the thought of all the manual tweaking I’d have to do in order to get it look just the way I wanted.
I also gave thought to tweaking the existing theme, perhaps going with a different body font. Right now I use Verdana, which is entirely readable if a bit bland. I experimented with Arial, Georgia and Garamond but none of them quite looked right. I began searching the vast reaches of the Internet and found a site called I Love Typography. I instantly went gaga over the body font used there and used my Interweb sleuthing skills to determine which font it was, as the site did not appear to share this particular detail. My efforts were without success so I sent an e-mail to the author of the (quite lovely) site and to my delight, he replied the same day with a single word response: Scala.
I now had knowledge but was faced with two new problems as a result:
- How the heck did he get a font I clearly do not have to render properly on his site? What sort of JavaScript or CSS trickery was involved? I would have to find out.
- Scala is a paid font. If I wanted to buy it I’d be looking at about $239 U.S. for the six fonts featured in the FF Scala Web collection. Now, I’m not saying they are not worth it. I’m saying I wish I had $239 to blow on fonts, because I’d probably have enough to buy some nice fudge, too. Mmm, fudge. Lacking both fudge and funds, my alternative is to look for a reasonable facsimile of Scala as a free font. That means combing through roughly one trillion hideous fonts scattered across an equally large number of font websites.
Ergo, Verdana stays. For now.