Can I Get an Omacron?

We had fun with fonts a few weeks back while working on the Folbot website. 2 issues threatened to compromise the design/programming of the site. I’ll break it down for you…

Problems initially arose when dealing with headlines. JC knocked one out of the park on his design for the site, but did us no favors with the headline font, which wasn’t a typical run-of-the-mill web safe font. Not content to take the easy way out and slice a million graphics for the titles, we used sIFR, which in-short takes plain text, runs it through Flash quickly and outputs an equivalent embedded with the font of your choice. (The cool part about sIFR is the plain text code remains searchable by engines like Google, so really everyone’s winning here).

Second, Folbot has a new kayak they call the Citibōt. Citibōt is spelled with a special Latin character called an omacron, which puts a line over the “o”. No big deal for most web fonts – we just insert the html for the character and it appears on the site.

If I haven’t lost you yet, here’s where it gets interesting. We’ve solved the problem of not having to use graphic titles with sIFR, but the headline font of choice – Avenir – still lacks the Latin character for omacron. What to do about Citibōt you may ask? Why, we edited Avenir, of course! With our newly embedded Frankenstein font in sIFR, the Citibōt’s name displays correctly across the site and we didn’t have to resort to cheapening ourselves with lame headline graphics.