[Avenir]

So here's my dilema.

I intern at an architecture firm and the past few summers I've taken care of the website at the office as well. Strictly maintinence, not much design as it was created before I arrived. In the time I've been gone (year at school), a new employee has redesigned the whole page, though she's more graphics-inclined and did all the sample pages in Illustrator. My job, should I choose to accept it, is to create the pages and insert the images like she has laid out, using Dreamweaver or whatever. Very little design, mostly just formatting to fit someone else's. Easy enough. The problem is that she uses Futura (popular, but not always installed on everyone's machine), she is also wise enough to know this, and that web text sometimes has rendering problems with sizes. She wants her design locked, and wants to use all flat images, for text paragraphs, descriptions, news, EVERYTHING. Besides the loading time (she said I should use preloaders, but I'm not a huge fan of javascript preloaders), the editing of the text later on will be hell, even if I save all the 100+ .psd or .ai files that I create the text "images" with. However, she's higher ranked than I, and she wants the page to look perfect and static, she's not worried about the editing process. I'm sort of at a loss, should I push the issue more, or is flat image text not really that bad, and I'm just not thinking about something. any advice would be great, sorry this is a bit confusing, I'll clarify as need be. Thanks in advance.


Edit: I think I should add that the moral to this story is probably that people with little or no HTML/web experience should not design entire web pages from scratch, and hope for miracles. Oh, and she really wants a flash site, but with my (lacking) knowledge of Flash, I told her no to that already. If it comes down to it, I might be able to tell the big boss "I can't and don't think we should do this the way she wants to, if you still want to do it her way, you will need to pay another outside company to design the page." (That was their option before I returned to the firm for the summer).

[piot]

I understand her desire to control the absolute look of the web site....but you are right....that is just not the right way to go about it. Preloading images dosn't make them load any quicker...it just means that people will spend a longer time looking at a blank page! How many pageds did you say? 100? No way! Just unprofessional. And murder to update!

You can have pretty tight control over text using css and perhaps reserve Futura in an image form for headings etc.

Why don't you mock up a couple of her pages doing it 'the right' way' and see how close you can get to her original design? Also take a look at as many competitors sites to help back up your argument.

PS. One could 'hold' the design and use any font using Flash...but if all you are doing is creating a static site it seems a little pointless.

Good luck

[Arkham_c]

That's a horrible idea. Horrible. I would leave such a site in about 10 seconds in disgust. What about people with vision problems? You can't increase font size or use a screen reader. Does she think it's going to look exactly the same on every browser anyway (because it's NOT -- there are lots of people using other browsers besides IE 5.5/IE6 out there).

The web is not a print medium. You absolutely cannot turn it into one. Tell this woman she's smoking crack, and if she protests, escalate to her boss. What she is discribing is a disaster waiting to happen, both from a management perspective and a usability perspective.

Nobody gives a crap about fonts. Content is king.

[larkost]

I agree with the other comments that trying to make the web into print is a bad idea, and will wind up alienating most users. Pre-loading images is going to solve exactly nothing.

If you have to do this, then the best of a bad thing would be to write the page as PHP using ImageMagic and creating the images as a part of the publishing process. This will not be trivial, but is better than doing everything by hand, and you can always tell it to re-publish.

But this is a bad idea... text as images is always a bad idea, only in rare cases is is the lesser evil.

[Macola]

Using graphics for text this extensively, as others have said, is just about the worst idea I've ever heard. If I were in your place, I'd be looking for another job

[philzilla]

sorry, but you need to have this person fired. she is clearly insane.

[Avenir]

hahaha

I didn't expect to be laughing when I read the replies, but thanks (Phil, yours, as usual, is especially direct and to the point). So the verdict is pretty much what I decided: text images bad, saving the font is not worth the rest of the hassle.

Any other input would be greatly appreciated, even if just for the laughs while I'm at work. Thanks again all.