Like most designers who migrated from print media to the web, I’ve always found it frustrating that the selection of fonts available for use on web sites is limited by what the site visitor has installed on his computer. The 20 or so “browser-safe” font options are a dreary collection of faces that either come preloaded in some form on Mac and Windows computers or get added by various Microsoft product installers. Until fairly recently, if you wanted to display text in beautiful fonts, the best option was to create headlines and other display text as images. But images are roadblocks to effective search engine indexing, so designers have had to learn “image replacement” tricks to preserve searchable text for headings intended to be displayed as images.
In the last couple of years, though, there’s been growing interest and browser support for a specification called @font-face. @font-face is a component of the Cascading Style Sheet standards that allows a web designer or programmer to place font data on the web server and then specify that font in web pages. A few foundries have made “web fonts” available for download and use under free (or at least generous) licenses. Webfonts.info is a helpful resource for learning about this technology.
Commercial foundries are getting into the act, too. But in the interest of keeping downloadable fonts from getting redistributed willy-nilly, they’ve come up with ways to maintain control of the font data. They host the fonts on their own web servers, and web designers have to sign up for free or paid accounts to make use of them. Within the user account, the designer creates a “project” or “kit” that makes selected fonts available for use on a specific web site. In some cases, the designer must also associate specific fonts with the CSS styles to which they’ll be applied on the web site under development. The foundry then supplies a javascript code for the designer to place on each page where the font will be used.
Monotype is offering a free web font beta program while it works to develop its proprietary method for selling font subscriptions. Typekit already offers three tiers of subscription pricing, as well as a free-trial plan, which lets designers who are new to this technology get their feet wet. The free plan allows users to specify two Typekit fonts on a single site.
On Monday, Typekit announced a partnership with Adobe to add 26 Adobe font families to the Typekit library, including the wildly popular Minion, Myriad, and Adobe Garamond fonts.
Do you plan to add web fonts to your web site or blog? Will you stick to free options, or do you think web typography is worth spending some money on? Let me hear from you in the comments.
This sounds very promising. Thanks for providing the info–I will be checking it out!