Typekit – Designing Webpages With Real Fonts

Screenshot of Typekit

Tonight I decided to give the new font service Typekit a try on my website. The service uses your browsers inherent ability to link fonts, and has worked out licensing with a number of font houses so you can link these fonts with no fear of legal action. The quote from Typekit below basically says it all.

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.

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.

I found Typekit easy to implement – you only need to add two lines of javascript to your head tag, and then choose your fonts.

All in all, I’m starting to love the Typekit services. I would recommend it to all web designers that what to play around with some new fonts beyond our normal “web safe group”. It’s fun, free, and it’s easy.

BTW, I’ll be changing the fonts on my website the next few days to test out the service. More feedback to come.