Ah, web typography. When I did my first website back in 1997, things were pretty much limited to a choice between Arial and Times New Roman. Then Microsoft introduced Verdana and a couple of others, and people found out they could get away with really small font sizes. Georgia was lovely but not for everyone, and Trebuchet… well it just replaced Arial in my mind. The fact remains, for the last twelve years designers had less than a dozen sure choices for web type, fonts readily available in both Windows PCs and Macs. Windows Vista introduced a few pretty good fonts (such as the Candara that used to be this blog’s first choice), and that had designers writing ridiculously large CSS font stacks in order to maintain a small amount of control. Some did go all the way and wrote scripts that replaced HTML text with Flash movies which had some font embedded, but that’s a pretty crude solution to a problem that should be easier to solve.

It took ten years but finally most browsers support font embedding. Internet Explorer is a nuisance, as always, because despite being the first browser to support embedding (since I first started making websites, in fact!), it does so through some peculiar font format which is incompatible with everything else. Anyway, I finally jumped right into the @font-face bandwagon. You should be reading this text in CartoGothic (Font Squirrel also has a pretty friendly tool to help with the CSS and the conversion to IE format); and the headlines should be set in Jos Buivenga’s Delicious. If you are using one of the latest browsers, that is. Enjoy!

Update: screw that, using CartoGothic brings too much of a lag on page load. So it’s back to Trebuchet. But I’m keeping the titles set in Delicious.

Nearly ten years ago I got a Fuji MX-2700 as a birthday present. Despite its 2.3 megapixels and its fixed zoom lens it was as expensive back then as a decent laptop computer or a lower-midrange DSLR are now, not even accounting for inflation. Basically it was the most expensive present someone ever gave me, so I really made the most of it — the lackluster electrical appliance was my camera of choice for the next five years, despite my affairs with analog Yashicas and Nikons bought on eBay. Late 2005 I finally decided to give the Fuji a rest from being utterly crap, as in the meantime I was starting to get fed up with getting beter results from a BenQ toy camera that didn’t even have a viewfinder. So I got a somewhat better BenQ (how I love thy cheap electronics) for about 100 euros, and a couple years later, while at Fnac browsing a crate of items that have previously been on display at the store (therefore likely to have been abused by overeager button-pushers), got one of the worst and ugliest cameras Canon ever made for 50 euros, so I could go and hack it.

So anyway, last week I finally decided I should buy a proper digital camera. I can’t afford a good DSLR (say, a 5D Mark II?), and if I’m buying a DSLR nothing less than a fullframe sensor makes sense — anything less is a camera for wearing on weekends, impressing the clueless hipsters in the downtown cafés while making a fool of yourself in front of anyone who actually knows his optics (the people you really intended to impress). But I digress: If I can’t buy a fullframe sensor, at least I should do myself a favor and buy a lighter, smaller camera, so I thank my friend Ivo for pointing me the kind of small point-and-shoot camera a real photographer would buy: the Panasonic LX-3. Nevermind this camera is the Leica D-Lux 4 minus the logo and 300 euros. He had me sold with the f2.0 lens.

An in fact the camera feels like Quality. It has the size it should have for its abilities, unlike the junk SLRs you can get for the same price. And the way the lens is so well thought out sets it apart, a symptom of why the LX-3 is great: it can’t zoom past 60mm (35mm equiv.), but in a camera this small and (relatively) cheap, why would you want a tele (and the inherent loss of aperture, bigger body)? Are you a chromatic aberration nut? Good thinking by the Panasonic engineers there.

In a nutshell, the Panasonic is a good solid photographers’ camera. And I only wonder why are there so many crappy point-and-shoots being sold by the same 330 or so euros. Oh, because those come in pink. But nevermind those: the LX-3 is definitely highly recommended.