Just an FYI. If you’re a writer, or are designing a blog for one, you may find this post helpful — just my latest personal post on my Wordpreneur blog.

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This post has moved to my Wordpreneur blog at:

http://wordpreneur.com/split-testing-your-wordpress-blog-theme-designs/

This post has been moved to my Wordpreneur blog at:

http://wordpreneur.com/bad-web-design-really/

After fielding at last count 6 email inquiries on what font I used in the previous post — all coming in within an hour of the post going live, and this new-ish site barely has any traffic — this post should make it easier for me to reply to any future questions.

But first, you may be wondering, why bother, what with the Comic Sans MS font being free on pretty much every computer known to man. Comic Sans? Ugh. I’m not and have never been particularly fond of Comic Sans, and I’m being very polite. I also know that I’m not doing a Lindbergh on this flight. As far as I’m concerned, if you want anyone to take your designs seriously, stay away from the damn thing.

All you have to do is take a look at what real pro comic book fonts really look like (and not just trying to remember what you think they may have looked like way back when you still used to read the things), and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Just browse through the freebie fonts from who I consider the best source of free comic book fonts today:

Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering

And it’s not like you’ll find the Blambot designs available elsewhere, at least not legally, since the fonts are all Blambot originals. Considering the prolific output and the huge number of them available for free immediate download (no need to even “sign up” for anything), that should be enough to tell you that creating comic book letterforms isn’t just a hobby for Blambot.

Oh, almost forgot: The Blambot font I used in the previous post‘s example was the Evil Genius dialogue font.

With its seemingly endless supply of design themes (free and paid), WordPress is a DIY small online publisher’s dream. But unless you know how to muck around with CSS style sheets, you’re stuck with the theme designer’s font choices. And, even if you are able to change font specs, you’re practically limited to the most universally common fonts — after all, even if you specify it in the style sheet, if the end user doesn’t have the font installed, he just won’t see it (he’ll still see the content, but not in the font you spec’d). Bummer.

Now wouldn’t it be neat if there were an easy way around that technical limitation, letting you specify whatever TrueType or OpenType font you want for just about every text design element of your WordPress blog (except body copy)?

Well, here you go! There is a solution, and it’s free. Get this free WordPress plugin:

AnyFont by Ryan Peel

It lets you upload any TrueType and/or OpenType font file to your server, which can then be used to change various text elements of your theme’s design, such as post and page headings. In this image, for example (click to enlarge), in a WordPress demo/test installation using the default theme, I’ve changed the page head font to a comic book font (to see the original default head, click here).

How does it do it? It auto-generates graphic files (PNGs, from what I can see on my test installation). So, what you’re actually seeing are images, not text, eliminating the need for readers to have the right font installed to see what you want them to see. No need to worry about whether your visitors are using Windows PCs, Macs, etc., either. This approach, however, makes it thoroughly impractical for changing the fonts of your blog’s body copy — no surprise, then, why AnyFont has absolutely no effect on your WordPress blog’s post and page copy.

AnyFont gives you a surprising amount of control over everything else, however (font sizes, shadows, padding, etc. etc. etc.). Playing around with it before full implementation is more than just a pretty good idea. Note too that with some themes, using AnyFont can produce unexpected, even undesirable results. So test, test test before committing fully to its use.

This post has been moved to my Wordpreneur blog at:

http://wordpreneur.com/this-basic-design-principle-never-fails/