Using Google Web Font Variants

With the avail­ability of Google Web Fonts,  many web designers are taking advan­tage of the improved and con­trolled typog­raphy they allow. I did some type redesign over at Bob Rockefeller Photography using the sans-serif face Arimo for titles and headers, and the serif face Lora for body text.

Making a simple font avail­able on a web­site is a simple matter of adding a line like this at the head or your CSS file (using Arimo as an example):

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Arimo);

Google’s web­site makes it easy to gen­erate the needed code for any number of fonts and styles. And that’s where a little more knowl­edge is required.

To use the normal style of the font, your CSS just has to assign it to a rule, like this:

font-family: 20px Arimo, sans-serif;

Notice that I’ve included the browser’s default san-serif face as a backup, in case there is some­thing wrong with Google’s servers. At least the user will see a read­able ver­sion of your site.

And get­ting to the italic ver­sion of the font is straight for­ward, too, just use:

font-style: italic;

Now you need to be a little more careful for any of the “fancier” avail­able faces, such as the dif­ferent weights that Exo comes in (100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900). Obviously simply using:

font-style: bold;

won’t do it alone. The “trick” is to use the font-weight prop­erty, like this:

font-weight: 400;

or:

font-weight: 700;

to get at the var­ious font weights any font face may have avail­able (assuming you’ve loaded them all back in the @import step). For font faces with dif­ferent weights of italics, just com­bine the two.

To be sure you’re get­ting the font face you want in the sit­u­a­tion you want it, your CSS file will have to be sure to define all the sit­u­a­tions in your design:

strong,
b {
font-family: “Lora”, serif;
font-weight: 700;
}

p em {
font-family: “Lora”, serif;
font-style: italic;
}

That’s pretty much it. If you have any tech­niques to add, please add them in the comments.

WordPress + ProofBuddy + NextGEN Gallery

After upgrading to the Developer’s Version of the WordPress frame­work Headway, I thought I should learn more about it by cre­ating my pho­tog­raphy site with it. Bob Rockefeller Photography had been run­ning on the PhotoDeck ser­vice, but I wanted to bring the whole of it – blog, port­folio and client proofing – all together on the same server. So a project was born.

The deci­sion on the plat­form (WordPress) and the frame­work (Headway) having been made, I did some research on a good port­folio system and didn’t take long to find that NextGen Gallery would more than do the trick. It is very pow­erful and adapt­able, tow­ering above the competition.

Finding a client proofing system wasn’t so easy. Many pho­tog­ra­phers use ser­vices such as PhotoDeck, PhotoShelter, SmugMug Pro and Zenfolio, which means the market for WordPress client proofing sys­tems is small. What I found were ProofBuddy (free for Lite and $150 for Pro), Photography Orders ($200), and Photo Video Store ($83). Each had their strong points and each would handle the chore, but in the end I picked ProofBuddy. I’m using the Lite ver­sion 2.0 now, but intend to upgrade to Pro when ver­sion 2.1 is released.

I had two main require­ments for the client proofing system: it had to be easy for inex­pe­ri­enced clients to use and it had to be adapt­able enough to be styled to match the rest of the site. With the blog, port­folio and proofing areas all run­ning together, they needed to look like a uni­fied whole, not three inde­pen­dent parts. ProofBuddy’s theme system fit the bill for adapt­ability – the CSS was exposed and there were tem­plate files for tweaking the HTML and PHP as needed.

While the proofing area is not flashy, it has all the pieces needed for a client to easily view their proofs and order the images they want in the sizes they need. The client gets auto­matic emails con­firming the order and on any status updates. I get emails for the orders and can manage mul­tiple clients easily from the admin­is­tra­tive inter­face. There are options for me to offer dis­count coupons and the Pro ver­sion will allow me to sell photo packages.

ProofBuddy con­nects easily to PayPal as its only pay­ment system, which is fine with me. Most of my work is local and clients pay me directly, anyway. Others may need the more variety pay­ment sys­tems offered by the other options.

In the end, I’m pleased with the results. My cus­tomiza­tions are pretty well iso­lated from Headway, NextGEN Gallery and ProofBuddy so that updates to those key sys­tems won’t require much design (or redesign) effort. Take a look at the Bob Rockefeller Photography site and see how it all came out.