Cufón has been growing in popularity among designers as an alternative to sIFR. I have personally used it on a couple website designs for clients now, and I have to say, it’s a great tool to add creativity to your website without cluttering it with a huge amount of image tags.
I went through the interwebs and scoured for hours upon hours (ok, maybe just 2) to find a showcase of some of the creative uses of the Cufón font replacement in action. Below are those websites. If you know of one (or you own one), feel free to drop a comment and let us know. :)
The Visual Click ↓
Press 75 ↓
Newlife Uniting ↓
IceArt ↓
International Rugby Association ↓
Phoenix Web Design ↓
St. Andrews Presbyterian Church ↓
Rock Beats Paper ↓
Mochi Media ↓
Pixel PR Studio Reklamy ↓
ROCK.CZ ↓
Momentify ↓
Localti.me ↓
Healthy Valdosta ↓
Don’t Talk To Robots ↓
Sage Blue ↓
Camtessa ↓
You Know Who ↓
Pixel Hype Design ↓
Shopify ↓
Primer Presents ↓
Chantyce ↓
PSD2eCommerce ↓
Strip Turnout ↓
Zendesk ↓
Yellow Bird Project ↓
Mana Music ↓
Rut Med Flera ↓
Ugmonk ↓
34One Design Studio ↓
Meinl Percussion ↓
Copimaj Interactive ↓
Adlucent ↓
CGInspired ↓
Zero One Hundred ↓
Logobay ↓
Corking Design ↓
Gaby Castellanos ↓
Wrangler Face Off ↓
Festival Boreal ↓
Your Turn To Talk
Again, like I said at the beginning of the article, drop us comments and let us know what sites you liked best and if there are any we missed. Also, feel free to let us know what kind of round-up we should focus on next. If there’s something you’d like to see more of, let us know :)
Author: Mike Smith
Mike Smith writes a freelance blog on a regular basis and is also a blog designer at Guerrilla.
I was working on a Joomla website for TradePoint that needed the headers in a different font. I found something about Cufon and could implement it within an hour or so. And not slow at all. Works great for me!
Nice list by the way!
Handy for some research I’m doing … thanks.
http://www.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=usworldcup
Great collection :)
Can I add my? But its still in development, so i can’t give You the link.
Here is the preview :)
http://img131.imageshack.us/i/cufon.jpg/
That is a good selection of sites using the Cufon replacement method. I’ve used it in a few of my sites and find it to be a great tool and a lot easier to implement than Sifr. I also found it easy to solve any problems I had when using it; there seems to be a fairly extensive user base.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Momentify (the 12th one) is a template right off Theme Forest…. I don’t see how that qualifies as anything creative…
@Owen: Yes, but even if it’s a template it doesn’t mean Cufón wasn’t used in creative ways :)
Great collection :) I’ve never used Cufón before. Will definitely try it :)
—
http://rl-creative.com
thanks for the mention chaps.
dean @ pixel hype design
Having used both sIFR and cufon, I am a big fan of cufon. We do use cufon in a couple of themes of ours, Delirium and Raptor. If you’d have known probably one of them would have made it to the list :) Great selection though. Cheers
These look awesome… I will definitely trying to use Cufón. Thanks for the post!
cufon is great, but the best technique to do font replacement, that do not rely on javascript neither image replacement, neither flash is using @font-face, it works for IE6+, Firefox 3.5(+), Safari 4(+), and Opera 9+, the only browser that does not work for now is chrome, although i think google will change their beavior quite soon.
nice collection, i like Cufón
Honoured to be included on the list.
The Adlucent site is a particular favourite of mine.
WoW :) Awesome collection of cufon font. Thanks for sharing this nice post.
Wohoo, thanks for mentioning us! Glad you like it :)
Cheers for the mention guys!
I came across my portfolio site in this article, which i found amusing
Cufon is a brilliant tool ever since i came across it a few months back i don’t think i have made a website since that doesn’t use it.
There are a couple little bugs which i do hope cufon will fix but its definitely nice to be able to use any font you like.
Good bye arial
Cufon in action and Cufon plugin for WordPress can be found here http://tomsramek.com/plugins/all-in-one-cufon/
Enjoy!
Excellent work. Thanks for spending the 2 hours scouring the web for examples of one can do with cufon.
Hi there, nice round up of sites. I’ve been using Cufón in most of my sites since it became available and I’ve definitely found it to be be a much more usable script than SiFR. I’m looking forward to seeing how @fontface works out though. Here’s my own site, which heavily relies on Cufón throughout for its visual style and hierarchy. Let me know what you think… http://okellydesign.com
Niall
Great article, some brilliant uses of cufon. I’m yet to implement it on any of my sites, but definately look forward to getting it sorted in the near future
Unfortunately, most of these websites are breaking the law and you’re doing your readers a disservice by not pointing that out. The licenses for many of the fonts used in your examples actually prevent the use of something like cufon (which re-constructs the font as JavaScript code). With cufon, someone could just steal the JavaScript code and, thus, the font. Very few fonts — even the ones pre-installed on your system — are legally usable by cufon. Aurulent Sans is a proper open source font (there aren’t many) and could be used. Perhaps Google’s Droid font too, but you’d need to check.
Cufon is cool stuff – i used it on a travel agency site recently: http://www.shipsandtripstravel.com
(Dynamic Feature Rotator and Specials) and multiple fonts on the testimonials page: http://shipsandtripstravel.com/about/testimonials.html
great collection, Thanks!
Really useful. Thanks
“Unfortunately, most of these websites are breaking the law and you’re doing your readers a disservice by not pointing that out. ”
Here here.
As a designer, you should be ashamed of yourself for overtly violating IP law. I counted three illegal uses from firms like Hoefler & Frere-Jones (http://typography.com) which states:
“the delivery of fonts via @font-face (and therefore cufon) constitutes the illegal distribution of our font software, and we therefore do not permit our fonts to be used in this way.”
@Lance: Thanks for pointing that out. I should clarify that we (myself or SpyreStudios) didn’t design any of the sites showcased inthis post, we basically just showcased them for inspiration. It’s up to the site owners to check the font licenses and EULA before using them fonts.
Cheers
Seems really silly that Cufon violates the EULA of some foundries. You can restrict it to specified domains, which means it can’t be stolen from your site. At that point, the rendered fonts are basically images which you could have manually exported from Photoshop, so I don’t see what the problem is.
As web designers, we have to make a lot of difficult choices. You could abandon SEO and just use images for text, or you can abandon nice-looking fonts for the few standard web fonts we have. The type foundries are no help, so we step up and build tools to bridge the gap– sifr, cufon, typekit (and other @font-face services).
I wish the foundries would give us an acceptable alternative rather than hoarding their precious fonts with such restrictive licenses.
Anyhow, I wanted to post a shameless plug to my Cufon-powered profile page: http://www.chrisfletcher.net
@Jon: Thanks for addressing that – sorry for the harsh words.
What might make a good companion or follow up to this article is a nice collection of fonts that are free to use with Cufon or @font-face. Finding good ones, especially ones that are decent replacements for restricted fonts, can be difficult at times. Even better would be any CDNs of fonts (like Google http://code.google.com/webfonts) so you don’t have to slow down your site too much just for a headline.
Muito Bonito. Sempre Gostei do Cufon.
i just used cufon to display handwriting and sketchy fonts on this new site:
http://www.faithfloralstudio.com
cufon is cool stuff!
My friend constantly linked me to this blog page yet this is now the 1st page I’ve peruse currently. Im highly amazed and right away a follower of this.