Typography on the Web

Typography on the web has been a thorn in the sides of website designers since the very beginning. Currently, a user has to have fonts installed on their system to display them in browsers, which means true web type is generally limited to a few basic fonts (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, etc). A few basic fonts just doesn’t cut it when designing attractive websites, so designers and developers have created a few workarounds.

The most basic is to simply save type like headlines as an image. This ensures it will render properly on any browser, regardless of what fonts users have installed. The problem is that it’s not really type; users can’t highlight it (for copying and pasting), and search engines won’t index it as such. It’s also a bigger file size, although this is less of an issue now that more users are on high-speed connections. In general this is the most common solution, but fundamentally flawed. For various reasons, text on the web should be actual text.

While it is technically possible to just link to full fonts on a webpage, it’s also illegal. Type foundries often have different licenses for different uses; even free fonts are generally not legally allowed to be linked to or redistributed on the web.

A less common solution was a process known as sIFR. In short, sIFR saved fonts as Flash files, which could then be assigned to text to render it as a different font. Users saw the text as whatever font the designer intended it to be, without the need to have it installed on their system. It was a clever solution, but even the creators knew it was temporary at best. Flash files are even larger than images, and browsers take a long time to render them, so using sIFR for a lot of copy would often result in the browser crashing. Users also had to have Flash installed, which is ok for most users but is often problematic for mobile browsing. sIFR is still a good option for headlines, but last month there was an announcement that changed everything.

Typekit is a new service aimed at bridging the gap between type designers and web designers. From their blog [http://blog.typekit.com/]:

That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design.

We’ll be launching this summer with a great collection of beautiful and hardworking typefaces. We’ll offer a free version of the service to get you started, and a low-cost way to grow from there. A truly scalable professional version will follow soon after.

Here at Media Genesis we’ll be watching the development of Typekit closely — better typography on the web is better for everyone.