graphic fonts

Hi,

I am in the process of designing my sites front page, and have been looking around at other sites to kind of get a feel for what works, and what doesnt work. Basic look and feel so to speak.

Anyways, I have noticed most places with decent traffic have a very stylized front end to their sites. These are usually image maps, and have very individual and stylistic fonts used within the pictures of the main table. I know these are not standard fonts, and need to know if these are drawn in using graphics software , freehand, special font applications or what?

I can hold my own cropping and editing photos with the best of them. but have never attempted such a stylized or themed text before. How are you all getting these great fonts?

Anytime you see stylized fonts like that, they've been added onto a graphic image in a graphics program like Photoshop or FireWorks ... it's the only way that everyone can see the font. If used as a text style on a webpage not everyone would see the fancy font style. If a surfer didn't have xyz fancy font on their computer, the computer would automatically show their default font, usually Times New Roman.

6500 Free Fonts

You can go there to get free ttf fonts for Windows. Download them to a folder first and then install them to your fonts folder in Windows. If you're on a MAC - you can't use the ttf, but need fonts made for the mac systems.

Just a headsup about fonts ... don't go crazy with installing hundreds of fonts, as all of those styles in your font folder have to load in while your computer is booting up, and a lot of them can seriously slow down your bootup time.

I have learned some already since this post was put up :)

I have done some work in fireworks in the past, and saved the entire image as a graphic, as you mentioned. However, some of the fonts I see are definitely not done that way. I can only figure there must be some crazy cool plugins for photoshop etc... that deal with fonts in that manner. I am doing some digging around in the meantime, as well as having a friend help me some with the graphic design part of things. Hopefully I am on the right track :)