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Usage notes and full CSS-powered webfont specimens for November’s Rising Stars

With the release of each month’s MyFonts Rising Stars newsletter, we take the opportunity to put the selection through their @font-face paces. While not every best-selling desktop font will necessarily make a seamless transition to the web, we find that with a little tinkering and willingness to compromise, most stand up to the task well enough.

November’s Rising Stars (as webfonts)

Nexa is the latest release from the Bulgarian foundry FontFabric, and is another geometrically constructed typeface in the vein of last year’s Code Pro. However, it’s more optically balanced than Code Pro, making it a more versatile tool for web designers in particular, who will find it makes for compelling super-sized headlines as well as being good for longer blocks of text.

While this OpenType font contains some alternate characters that have a less geometric construction, these aren’t easily or reliably accessible yet, so we’d advise planning any layouts using the default basic character set.

Mercury Script is the latest distinctive script font from the designer of Mishka and Slim Tony (we used Mishka to demonstrate a neat CSS logotype last year).

Like many OpenType-powered connecting scripts, Mercury needs some degree of OpenType support in order to be fully effective. This includes activating ligatures and some alternate characters to ensure the best letter combinations are available. Because support for OpenType is so unreliable, we would recommend keeping any typographic layout using Mercury as simple as possible.

Neuron is the work of Columbian designer Manuel Eduardo Corradine, known mostly for his highly-accomplished lettering and script work. This face is something rather different, yet it bears the same hallmarks of lively humanism and will bring a softer, more personable character to web pages containing extensive text.

Fonts designed to look hand-lettered — i.e., as if they aren’t fonts at all — are an area of the new typographic web where designers can really get their hands dirty and make a perceptible difference to a website’s aesthetic. Luella is a great example of the potential these types of fonts can bring to a project: as well as a quirky, individualistic style that will be great for headlines (please, don’t use it for long paragraphs of text, ever) there are a multitude of ornaments, scrolls, banners and frames contained in the three accompanying fonts which will be a great way to add scalable, Retina screen-friendly graphics to your designs.