But one thing I have concerns about is that the LFS websites are planned to be multilingual, which complicates things when it comes to typography - mainly custom fonts.
If you use custom (not web safe fonts), I can think of two options. One is to use e.g. Google Web Fonts or any other techniques to use custom fonts on the web. But that brings some problems when using the font to display texts written in multiple languages. Lots of languages include characters that aren’t supported by those fonts (Cyrillic, Chinese etc., or even some Central-European characters).
Second option would be to use images instead of true text. But again, if the site is multilingual, it would be really difficult to manage images for each text using a custom font, for each language available - when they are expected to be updated regularly.
So the question is, whether to prefer a multilingual site over a good typography (I’m not saying a good typographical site cannot be made using only default fonts though).
Multilingual over typography.
Sorry designers, but Flame brings up an important detail. I know how much you'd like to go wild with typography, but the translations weigh more. So the only choice you have is to stick with unicode (web)fonts.
Unless you can show me another solution of course. I've done image generation based on language, but there as well we'll be stuck with unicode fonts to use during generation of the images.
As a general rule sans serif works better on the web. Very few web sites benefit from serif - who's domain is print.
EDIT: I should also point out that on a commerce site the importance of clarity cannot be overstated. Futuristic fonts with cut outs in the letter design are not good. If you are trying to take peoples money - and lfs.net is a storefront - then you have to make it easy and remove all objections. People don't like spending money, and look for reasons not to.
yeah I know that site. But the problem still is that there are very little unicode fonts out there (that may be used). So designers will have a limited set of fonts to work with.