Samantha Warren is a typography evangelist (like the Billy Graham of font). Her talk at SXSW on Wednesday entitled “Get stoked on Web Typography” was a passionate exhortation on the art of creating and choosing fonts.

Warren emboldened the audience to be daring, “There really isn’t a long history of web typography, we are at the beginning of the web font revolution, and we can all be a part of the revolution.”

She noticed that in most of her favorite designs there was “no Arial”, and “no Georgia”. “The difference between Arial and Habano is rock & roll”, she affirms, pointing to recent album cover art from My Morning Jacket. Compare the two images yourself: on the left is the original My Morning Jacket cover with the Habano font, on the right is an example where Warren substituted the text with Arial.

“A question I often hear from designers and developers is, ‘How do you pick a font’”, she admitted. “It’s a difficult questions to answer, but I like to think of it as ‘How do you choose a pair of shoes?’ I think about the weather and my schedule for the day. Shoes just go with people!”

“This woman is wearing crocks, they are practical and they match, but they just really fit her style.”

“These are my Helvetica shoes.They go with just about anything. I’ve worn them on interviews, to dinner, or just hanging out with friends”

“Archer is a font that everyone is using these days. If you’re trying to communicate ‘friendly and approachable’, and if you want to say it the same way that Converse is saying it, then use Archer.”

Until recent years, web developers were stuck using only web-safe fonts (like Arial and Georgia!). But now sIFR and (more preferably) cufon are challenging developers to use non-standard fonts: to beautify and challenge design conventions on the web. This is Warren’s call for action: stop being so agnostic, 2010 is the year to “get stoked on web typography”.

Samantha’s slides from the presentation are on SlideShare:

Tags: samantha warren, SXSW, SXSWi, typography