We just found an incredible open source method of creating rich typography called sIFR. The method, dubbed sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben. Although I believe only Mark is maintaining the project now. Big thanks to Mike and Mark for developing the great method.

How does it work?

Basically we can target any tag like h1 or h2 and have the text replaced automatically with a Flash movie containing any font we would like to use. It is easy to set up and will convert the tags site wide.

Normally, if we want to use a non-websafe font for, let's say, a title, we would have to create a jpg for each title. This can get very time consuming when done across an entire site with many pages. Updating becomes quite a pain also.

Another problem is accessibility. Since the text is an image, it will not get indexed properly in search engines or on screen readers. sIFR is completely accessible because the text is still there. If you look at the source code you will see something like this:

<h2>Alignment</h2>	

What you see on the screen though is nice, beautifully rendered text with any font. It also degrades nicely. If a user doesn't have Flash, they just see normal HTML text using your standard font. Very nice indeed.

We just implemented this solution on Luftig Warren's new site. See the titles on any page but the home page: http://www.luftigwarren.com/

We also just implemented it on this site. In factthe title above that says "How Does It Work?" is a Flash generated sIFR title. Pretty nifty huh.

For more on sIFR go here: http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/