Christian Ziebarth

Archive for April 2009

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Introducing Grufón

In Uncategorized on April 20, 2009 at 2:36 pm

I’m often finding or stumbling across new front end development techniques on the web, some of which I make a mental note to use sometime in the future and some of which I want to use right away. I recently found out about the grunge text effect at Janko Jovanovic’s blog and added it in to this CMZ Media Developer blog about an hour ago. The effect currently shows up on the headers from level two through four (H2 – H4); I may add it to other elements later on.

This technique utilizes a transparent PNG placed as the background image in a SPAN you include in the element you want to add the effect to. Since that will validate but it’s still a little on the hacky side I made it a little less hacky by using jQuery to write the SPAN in, like so:

  1. jQuery(‘H3,H4’).append(‘<span></span>’);

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Cufón – Initial Thoughts

In Uncategorized on April 8, 2009 at 12:12 am

So I just implemented the new Cufón for the first time. I can’t show the page it’s on right now because that page is only in staging at the moment (UPDATE: the effect can now be seen on this blog as well as at my online resume and personal site). Cufón is a technique like sIFR for using unique fonts on a webpage. The Cufón page claims that sIFR is “painfully tricky to set up and use,” but I always found sIFR to be pretty simple and straightforward and setting up Cufón seemed to take just as much time. The new jQuery sIFR is even better.

So, what is good about Cufón? Well, it seems to work faster than sIFR and it seems to be better than sIFR at handling larger blocks of text. You also don’t seem to need extra CSS to use Cufón.

Are there any drawbacks? Yes, the main one I can think of now is that, as far as I can tell, you can’t copy and paste Cufón text whereas sIFR text was copyable and pastable. Um, that’s the only one I can think of right now (in addition to the previously stated fact that the setup wasn’t simpler than sIFR’s setup), but it’s a big one. Here’s hoping the next version of Cufón addresses this issue.