Darker Me

Check how different fonts and styles look without recoding

The problem for designers, which quickly trickles down to developers, is that font choice can be dictated by browser choice, browser release choice, and CSS usage. These layers add up to create a fairly complex problem that is often solved by making a choice, seeing if it works, and then tweaking the CSS file over and over until the choice is perfect (or as close to perfect as you can get). This tweaking can take some time, unless you employ an amazingly helpful tool like FontFriend.

FontFriend is a Web browser bookmarklet that will make your design work so much easier that you will wonder what you ever did without it. With this tool you can simply open up your Web site, click on FontFriend, change the font and font styles as FontFriend makes the changes in real time, and then, once you have found the right font and font styles, apply those changes to your CSS files as needed.

Now, before I get into how to use this tool (it’s quite simple actually), I will warn you that the larger and more complex the site, the slower FontFriend will be. If the site is too large and too complex FontFriend could take your browser down. Fear not though, even if FontFriend takes down your browser, it will is not making any changes that are permanent or damaging. So, in the event of a crash, you will only need fire your browser back up.