TypeKit – HTML fonts for Web Designers Who Don’t Like HTML Fonts

Checking out a new service called TypeKit. If you are a web designer then you know well the fact that you are quite limited in what fonts are available when using HTML. SEO Web Design is the practice of making pretty sites that are also optimized for the search engines, too bad you can’t use pretty fonts without using images. Alt tags help but it just isn’t as effective as good old HTML text.

see update below

Have a look at the titles on this blog. Pretty cool eh? It’s HTML and it’s a wacky font. This is Typekit. These guys are bridging the gap between web sites and the font foundries. Way, way back in the good old days you could upload a font and call apon it with CSS using the @font-face style but the foundries didn’t like this willy-nilly usage of their products so they outlawed it. Typekit has started to make deals with many of these foundries so that us web designers can use them… for a price of course. I heard about Typekit a while ago and got on the waiting list, now that the service is out I got a free trial. I’m not sure how long it will last but hey, I have a wacky font on my site using good old HTML.

All you have to do is sign up and sign in, fill out a form so they know what site (singular) you’ll be using the fonts on, copy and paste a script into your header, then go and choose what fonts you want to use. The free trial I’m using has about 62 or so fonts in several different styles. Script fonts, grunge, block etc… You will need to know a little CSS because you need to assign the Typekit font to an id or a class. The interface is really simple, it took me about 3 minutes to figure the whole thing out and get the wacky font on my site.

You can use this service on 1 site for $30/yr. 5 sites for $50/yr. or 10 sites for $50/mnth. I’m guessing the thing to do is to run it by the client and see if they want to pay. I definitely know of several designers that I do programming for that will be on this like white on rice. They will have no problem convincing clients to either pay for the 1 site subscription or pay them a small fee to help pay for their monthly subscription. Maybe not, fonts are really important to some while others don’t really care as long as it’s readable.

Font faces are really important to a lot of designers especially those who come from a print background. On the other hand, I’m thinking that the average person starting a new website or redesigning an old one just wants it to be legible and the differences between Arial and Humanist are too minute for them to even notice let alone pay extra for. In any case, it will be interesting to see how this progresses.

This is what it looked like

update: I have removed the TypeKit scripts because they are breaking this site for IE users. Oh well. Read more at the typekit blog