14 DAY TRIAL // At their annual MAX conference, Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO announced the acquisition of Typekit, a true innovator in the world of web typography, and the most successful service in delivering web fonts to sites across the web.
If now everybody looks and expects to see non-standard web fonts in live websites, this was not the norm a few years back.
For a long time, Typekit has been the sole true researcher in the world of embedding fonts on the Web.
Its efforts in this domain have been previously noted by Google, which uses a modified version ofTypekit's open source WebFont Loader JavaScript library to deliver fonts from its Google Web Fonts repository.
Besides the open-source library the company provides various commercial solutions for embedding non-standard web fonts, being considered the most advanced service in this domain.
Typekit currently delivers fonts for renowned companies like Twitter, IGN, The New York Times, New Yorker, Behance, Posterous, WordPress.com, About.me, TypePad, Vanity Fair and many others.
At the same conference, Adobe has also announced a flurry of other acquisitions, which on the long run will help the company build its new Creative Cloud platform.
The Adobe Creative Cloud platform will be a new service from Adobe, allowing creative professionals to build and share modern designs from web-powered apps.
By looking at Typekit's main features we can say that it holds an intricate part in Adobe's plan. Typekit will allow the same kind of text and font manipulation from a web app as an user would expect and get from a normal desktop application.
“Typography is a fundamental design element and something that designers want to be more creative with on websites – especially as these websites now need to be viewed on mobile devices,” said Lea Hickman, VP of Product Management at Adobe Inc..
If your one of the 25,000+ Typekit clients, the service will continue to function as a stand-alone product, and as a part of Adobe's Creative Cloud platform the same.
The good news is that Adobe is currently leaping head first into the HTML5 & CSS3-powered Web, as it did in the past with Flash.
This means that a lot of things will change for the better, and Typekit users should expect new more powerful features in the upcoming months as the joint Typekit and Adobe development teams explore new boundaries of web typography.