More about fonts

Ever get incredibly frustrated with the way fonts look on your website?? Or don't look. Why can't they look exactly how you'd like- or even be the font you'd like at all? It's complicated- but help is on the way.

Typekit is a new subscription service that enables you to license fonts for use on the web. Service subscriptions which range from $24.99 per year to $249.99 per year- seem relatively easy to use. Moreover, they are stepping up the level of virtual design ten fold- here's what they say about their product:

"Every major browser now supports the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. For designers and developers, this is a significant step forward. No longer will you need to trap your content in images or Flash just to express yourself visually. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable. This is a massive upgrade for the web.

But there’s a problem. 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.

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 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.

As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design."

Check out the fonts here and plans here- definitely something to consider for New Year website updates...