Web Typography - Change at last

Good typography has always been one of the most frustrating aspects of web design. As a designer, our typographic palette is generally limited to a handful of serif /sans-serif cross platform fonts.

This is due, in the most part, to font licensing issues and a lack of browser support for TrueType fonts or the CSS selector @font-face.

Recently however, there has been some light at the end of the tunnel with most major browsers finally beginning to support @ font-face (apart from Chrome, which is due to implement @font-face in version 4), @font-face brings a cross-platform, cross-browser, lightweight method for referencing font files not found on an end users computer. In short: it allows web designers to store custom fonts on their server and reference them using CSS, regardless of what fonts the user has installed on their machine. This means we can now write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have our page render with the typography we expect.

For designers, this is a massive step forward. No longer is it necessary to hack our way to typographic variety through the use of bloated JavaScript/flash workarounds. In theory this should make web pages more usable, accessible, and visually interesting. 

Unfortunately there’s a catch, while it’s now technically quite easy to link to fonts on our server, it’s legally far more difficult. Most 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.  

Thankfully, a solution has been found that checks all the legal and technical boxes, and doesn’t need some god awful hack. It comes in the form of font serving services like these:

1. Kernest
2. Typotheque

In essence, these sites and the font foundries they have agreements with will serve the fonts directly to our websites, allowing designers full control over which font they deem appropriate for there design, with no risk of legal action from the copyright holders. Everyone’s a winner; web designers are liberated from the typographic shackles of system fonts and are able to make the web a more visually stimulating place, font designers can rest easy knowing that there hours of toil aren’t just sitting on a random server waiting for anyone to download/copy without paying and most importantly, clients sites look as good as they can without having to sacrifice bandwidth/dev time for clumsy JavaScript workarounds.

Finally we’re witnessing the confluence of the subtle nuances of print design with the dynamic and evolutionary nature of the web. Browser development coupled with the implementation of at font-face has opened new markets for font authors and sites like kernest.com insure that they aren’t going to be out of pocket. We may be stuck with Verdana and times New Roman for a little while longer, but the days of being restricted to the same old system fonts are rapidly coming to an end.