Indianapolis Web Design Blog

Hello graphic designers, that the font issue of the web have been solved – you know the problem: the one where a designer can’t make the visitors of his new website view his his favorite pet font?

Or has it really been solved?

Typekit released a blog post on May 27th introducing their solution which is supposed to revolutionize the way fonts appear online.

Looking at their promo image, I am initially and admittedly thrilled to see the words “Simple, Fast, Bulletproof.” because… if that’s true, then we’re in for a treat. But let’s think about this for a minute. As designers, most of us know how marketing works, and we know not to take it at face value. Upon further inspection, it seems to be without substance.

While most of the reactions I’ve read online have been “Hallelujah!” and “You guys will be rich when this takes off…” I’m glad to see some more intelligent, thoughtful reactions to this. With any vaporware (yes, this is vaporware right now) We shouldn’t buy the hype till it’s working. Making baseless statements like “it will change everything” should be something that people know better not to do by now when it comes to trumpeting software releases on the web.

I see several problems with this, many of which have already been touched on in the last 24 hours. From the description, this obviously has some sort of DRM. That’s not good no matter how you slice it. Just like a certain popular president, He’s saying one thing about DRM and describing the very opposite in the same breath.

“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.”

They just can’t have it both ways. Don’t be fooled… Digital Rights Management comes into play in the above statement: “a consistent web-only font linking license.”

The problem seen with Typekit’s proposed solution is obvious to folks who don’t jump so quickly onto hype wagons. It’s hard to discern the exact details, but we’re looking at a centralized library of sorts with DRM-enforced font files served up to websites via extra javascript. Is reading a page in a special font so much better than reading it in one of the commonly available ones so much of a benefit that designers and web developers are willing to spend money and add more encumberances to their website? Will the cost be passed on to the site owners? I don’t think that I could sell this “benefit” to the majority of my clients, and I sure wouldn’t use it for my own purposes.

If you must force a certain font on your viewer, making them download a bunch of code or some other encumbrance, and have to pay for it in the process, then you’ve put a speed bump into the simple and clear communication that should be happening online.

And that’s what it’s all about – communication.

commercial_fonts css drm drm_fonts font fonts font_use hype vaporware web_design

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under CSS, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.