Use Real Fonts on Web Sites
Press release
Typekit is the easiest way to use real fonts on the web. It’s a subscription-based service for linking to high-quality Open Type fonts from some of the worlds best type foundries. Our fonts are served from a global network on redundant servers, offering bulletproof service and incredible speed. And it couldn’t be easier to use. Want to know more about fonts on the web? Read on…
Fonts, Browsers, and the Web
So here’s the situation: Every major browser now supports the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. For designers and developers, this is a significant step forward. No longer will you need to trap your content in images or Flash just to express yourself visually. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable. This is a massive upgrade for the web.
But there’s a problem. While it’s technically quite easy to link to fonts, it’s legally more nuanced. Almost all fonts are protected by copyright — even those available for free — and very few of them allow for linking via CSS or redistribution on the web. This is understandable; font files represent countless hours of finely detailed labor. Appropriately, type designers are concerned that they’ll lose control of all that hard work.
The Typekit solution
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.
Let’s work together
Our pricing plans are designed to be flexible enough for most designers, developers, and web site owners. Some sites, however, are of a truly massive scale. Just drop us a note at [email protected] and we’ll walk you through options such as SSL serving, dozens of domain mappings, and scaling to millions or billions of page views.
If you design or distribute fonts, we’d love to chat. Send us note at [email protected] and let’s talk about the ways we can host, distribute, and market your fonts to a whole new audience.
About Small Batch
Typekit is produced by Small Batch Inc., a company dedicated to advancing what’s possible on the web. Founded in 2008 by Jeffrey Veen, Bryan Mason, Greg Veen, and Ryan Carver, Small Batch is a San Francisco-based company that has been designing and developing web apps together for years. In 2006, the team built Measure Map, the acclaimed blogging statistics tool that was acquired by Google. While at Google, they led the redesign of Analytics, a powerful website measurement tool used by millions worldwide. Since then, they collaborated with Twitter on user experience and business growth planning, and launched Wikirank — a trend analysis tool for Wikipedia. Additionally, they’ve been involved in W3C working groups and the Web Standards Project as proponents and active designers of the web’s infrastructure platform. In 2009, the company announced their first round of funding led by True Ventures.
A novel solution that should finally allow cross-platform fonts – the most interesting development for me since css! I wish Typekit well and will be testing it this evening. It will be even better when rivals and open-source solutions pop up as they surely will with time. Jed
Personally, I much preferred the old method of embedding fonts in the web documents on my own (the old application ‘Typograph’ made it relatively easy), but that method met a strong resistance from type foundries fearing a loss of revenues. That’s why they came up with the service you have to pay for every time you want to use non-standard fonts in web documents you create – even if you have already paid for those fonts.
Just “business-as-usual” – every time you turn around, you get the shaft from corporate world…