typekit

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to explain to clients that their beloved logo font simply cannot be used on the web. I explain that if the visitor doesn’t have the font you want to use installed then they can’t see it. Most of the time they are shocked that this is the case. And they should be shocked. It’s absolutely horrible that we have to deal with these limitations.

Technically it has been possible to use any font you choose through several existing techniques (plain old images or Flash/JavaScript/Canvas trickery like sIFR and Cufón). They all have limitations of varying degrees and body font choices are still limited to the usual suspects. So why is it so hard to use fonts on the web?

Copyright

The main issue is one of font copyright. Fonts are expensive. Making a font takes lot of time, dedication and talent. Font designers deserve to be paid for their incredible work. If you send the font over the internet when you visit a website it doesn’t take long to figure out what’s going to happen.

Font Delivery

The copyright issue had stopped the development of viable alternatives to Microsoft’s (ancient and proprietary) EOT format. Finally however, both Webkit and Mozilla (Safari/Chrome and Firefox) support the @font-face CSS attribute. Making it possible to create an all-browser encompassing font delivery mechanism.

Enter Typekit

The clever peeps at Typekit have managed to fix both problems in one fell swoop. By working with the type foundries directly, they have managed to gain licenses to distribute fonts over the web. They’ve also taken great pains to obfuscate the fonts they are distributing. More importantly for us lowly web designers, they’ve made this stuff ridiculously easy. Choose the fonts you want (236 options as of right now), get a snippet of JS and Bob’s your uncle. All the fonts are compatible with Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3.1+ and IE 5+ (!).

I just got my beta invite and am going to be reworking both this site and ActivElement to use my newly acquired library. Can’t wait to get my font on.