Brick. Webfonts that actually look good.
In the age of the Internet, we've found ourselves in yet another typographic battle. In an effort to speed up loading times, we've compressed fonts, and along the way, we've lost the majority of the quality of rendered type.
Let's change that. The fonts served by Brick are clones of the original, converted without modification to several formats for wider browser compatibility.
All fonts are served as WOFF-compressed versions of the originals—no quality lost.
Okay, let's get started. I don't want to overload the GitHub servers, so the font serving takes place on another server. The loading itself is quite simple; kind of like using Google Web Fonts (but with more customization options—we'll get to that later).
Suppose you want to use a font that's in the catalog, for example, TeX Gyre Heros, and only in regular weight.
The stylesheet URL would be structured like this:
//brick.a.ssl.fastly.net/TeX+Gyre+Heros:400
And if you also want to load EB Garamond regular and italic, you can do that too:
//brick.a.ssl.fastly.net/TeX+Gyre+Heros:400/EB+Garamond:400,400i
Big shoutout to Fastly, whose backing makes everything a lot faster, and Linode, for providing a reliable origin server!
You can see for yourself (best comparison is in Chrome; Firefox seems to render all fonts pretty well, though the difference is still clearly visible):
Take note of:
- Font rendering and smoothing
- Ligatures: the
filigature in the title - Kerning: the
Vepair inVestibulum - Character sets: although not demonstrated in the previews, Brick fonts include the entire character set that came with the original
Fonts used in the previews:
- EB Garamond (body text)
- Libre Baskerville (header and link)
For contributing guidelines and instructions, please see the wiki page.
You can also support this project by helping to cover the costs associated with it:
- Bitcoin: 12zWXDLguRMiRW1NZ7N4LF3g3Ji1Fb9AQ9
- Gittip