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When I heard the news, my immediate reaction was not positive. There may have been an expletive uttered. I am happy for the crew at Typekit, several of whom are my friends, but Adobe products do not fill me with joy when I use them. No one I know is filled with joy when using Adobe products…mostly the opposite. Typekit is a great service; I hope Adobe keeps it that way.
Matt Jacobs has made a bookmarklet that you can use to find out which Typekit fonts a given site uses. Useful!
Want to see the state of the art in web design using web fonts and Typekit? Check out Lost World’s Fairs. It’s all good, but Frank Chimero really knocked it out of the park with the 1962 Atlantis World’s Fair. With HTML5 and web fonts, experimentation with web design seems open and fun again; reminds me of the 90s a bit.
Typekit launched today (details here).
This will change the way you design websites. Add a line of code to your pages and choose from hundreds of fonts. Simple, bulletproof, standards compliant, accessible, and totally legal.
I haven’t had a chance to play around with this yet, but hope to soon. And hey, you can use Silkscreen with Typekit.
Jeff Veen has a look at how Typekit protects fonts served through the service.
To that end, our Javascript is minified and the fonts themselves are represented as Base64 encoded strings. You may see right through this, but the vast majority of web users wouldn’t know what to make of it.
Those Base64 encoded strings are then placed right into the CSS file. And even better than that, the fonts are split up into multiple files and recombined using the CSS font stack. Pretty clever stuff.
Typekit is an upcoming typeface hosting service which will provide vetted fonts that you can include in your site’s stylesheet using the @font-face mechanism.
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.
What a great idea. And web entrepreneurs pay attention, this is how to make a compelling online property: take an idea that everyone loves in theory but doesn’t use in practice because it’s a pain in the ass (in this case, embedding type on the web) and offer a hosting service to solve that problem. YouTube did this with videos, Blogger/Blogspot, TypePad, & Wordpress did this with blogs, Flickr did it with photos, etc. etc.
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