An incredible talk and animation from RSAnimate on motivation in the workplace.

An incredible talk (from TED) by Sir Ken Robinson on creativity and education.

Embeddable web fonts are definitely changing the face of website design. Here’s a quick introduction to web fonts, and some tools that are out there to help you get started.

What is a web font?

A web font is a font that has been converted to a web-friendly font file type and hosted online. Your website or blog can access that web font through a snippet of code.

But, why can’t I just use any font online?

In order for web browsers to show your special font, the font file either needs to live locally on the user’s computer, or it has to link to the font version online. Fonts such as Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia, Times are on everyone’s computers out-of-the-box, so these fonts are safe to use in web design. But any special display fonts that you might have downloaded aren’t necessarily on other people’s computers, so if you use that font in your website, the people looking at your site might not see the font. In order to have everyone be able to see your special font, you need to make sure it is converted to a web font format and hosted online, and have your website point to it.

How can I find a web font?

Check out the following links for some tools to embed fonts into your website. These services host the fonts and all you have to do is link to them:

• Google Web Fonts
• Font Squirrel
• Typekit

You can also generate your own font kit using Font Squirrel’s @font-face generator:

• @font-face Generator

Here you can take an appropriate font file (make sure there are no license restrictions for using the font on the web), upload it, and generate the files you will need to host the web font directly on your own server and link to it in your website.