Source: http://www.flickr.com.Photo: Nick Sherman. License: All Rights Reserved.

Screenshot taken of the nytimes.com homepage shortly after they called Obama's victory.

The night of the 2012 presidential elections was the first time the New York Times used webfonts for the headlines on their homepage. Specifically, their custom version of Cheltenham was used to report the news of the election results.

The Times has been using webfonts for their Opinion section and other less-prominent pages (served with the help of technology from Typekit), but this seems to be the first time that webfonts have shown up front and center on their homepage.

While the use of custom typefaces for headlines helps the Times tie their online presence more tightly with the rest of their existing (mostly printed) visual brand, there is still much room for improvement in the rest of the type palette and overall layout of their website. Most of the current site consists of Arial and Georgia arranged on a relatively generic and static grid.

Hopefully this new prominence of webfont headlines for some of the year's biggest news (as well as webfonts in the wonderful accompanying info graphics – a topic for a separate post on its own) points to upcoming improvements in nytimes.com's typography. They could take a lesson from their sister site, an overhaul with webfonts and responsive layout throughout.

Source: https://twitter.com.From the @nytimes Twitter account. License: All Rights Reserved.

Despite webfont headlines, there's still a disparity between the overall look and feel of the layouts for the paper and web editions of the Times. Shown here is a sneak peek of the Nov 7 print edition shared by @nytimes on Twitter.