14 DAY TRIAL // Fonts on the web have been very limited since its inception. The current technology limits designers to only six fonts without using Flash or other non-standard means which come with their own set of problems. This is about to change, as startup Typekit plans to help designers license fonts and use them in the sites they are creating.
This is how Typekit describes the service in its official statement, “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.”
Typekit was created by Jeffrey Veen, a noted web designer, who also worked on Google Analytics, set to launch this summer. Typekit will offer an easy way for designers to license the fonts that will be hosted by the company. This is made possible by the fact that most browsers finally started supporting the CSS feature @font-face that allows for fonts to be imported from the server and embedded in the site.
Up until now, designers have had limited options for fonts. They could use Flash or JavaScript but this was a problem because search engines couldn't index them. @font-face offered a better alternative but it had a few problems. The first one, lack of browser support, has been mostly fixed, as the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera support it. Internet Explorer is, as usual, left behind but with other browsers gaining more and more market share, this isn't much of a problem now. The second problem with @font-face is that most font licensing, even for free fonts, restricts embedding them with CSS and font foundries have been reluctant in changing that.
This last problem is what Typekit wants to fix. The new service isn't launched yet but Veen is hoping to make deals with the font foundries to allow designers to license and embed fonts hosted by Typekit. This approach does have its share of drawbacks, like the possibility that Typekit has an outage, but they are minor compared to other methods.