Too Good to Be True - Real Fonts on the Web?
A new web font service launched today called Typekit.com. They claim they can deliver an extensive library of high-quality fonts that can be incorporated into a site via a CSS line of code (@font-face). The idea of breaking out of the browser safe mac/pc fonts is liberating. But it just seems too good to be true.
This sounds very similar to the dynamic fonts functionality that was HOT a few years ago, but never caught on. Being the bleeding-edge designer that i am, we tried to use dynamic fonts on a site. But it only seemed to work sporadically. And the initial font download was bigger than we had expected. Ultimately, we could never be sure that the end user was seeing the same thing that we were. Just plain frustrating. So we never used it again.
The set of browsers that don't use the @font-face tags are browsers older than Firefox 3.5, Safari 3.4, and IE 5. So if you think of it, that's a pretty sad group of legacy browsers. Looking at the general browser averages, that's less than 20%.
Well, let's all go download the free version of Typekit and start testing this stuff out. If this technology is stable, elegant, and delivers what is says it will, it could potentially change everything for us designers.
