TypeKit

You may have seen the news about the folks over at TypeKit and their endeavor to work with font foundries in licensing fonts for web use. In the event you don't, here's a brief description:

Designers have long struggled with the inability of a web browser to display the fonts they're chosen for their web design. Not every computer has every font installed, thus limiting the reliability of using more than a handful of fonts. They've gotten around this by creating images of the font's they want to use, using Flash, PHP or javascript to create the desired font on-the-fly, etc.

Recently, however, new specifications allow for displaying "any" font on any modern browser, as long as the font is also on the web. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable. This is a massive upgrade for the web, as the Typekit folks like to say.

The problem with our new found freedom is that fonts tend to have legal restrictions on their use. Very few, if any, fonts allow for being linked to on the web. This is where Typekit comes in. They're attempting to provide a way for font foundries to have some control over their work and still have the fonts be accessible on the web. This is a good thing, we think.

We signed up to be notified when Typekit was ready to start offering accounts for real-world use. Just last week we received our anticipated invitation and are now testing the Typekit solution on some smaller, personal web sites. So far we're very pleased! This may work out great for us and our clients, as we'll be provided more flexibility without running into too many legal issues. We'll keep you posted on if and how we decided to implement the typekit solution more widely.

For a sneak peak behind the scenes, check out Chris Coyier's first ten minutes with Typekit over at CSSTricks.com.