Article

The Future of Web Fonts

Over the last 15 years, web design and development has evolved tremendously. The introduction of CSS, advancements with HTML, the ever-increasing power of JavaScript, and technologies like Flash and Silverlight, have made the visual world of the 2010 web very different from the web from even five or six years ago. Except of course, for typography.

Typography is an important design element that can drastically alter the look and even the feel of content. However, because of technical (and licensing) restrictions, dynamic fonts used on the web have been limited to a small subset of styles. On the positive side, over the last twelve months the landscape for web typography has changed dramatically.

New technologies and services, including Google’s recently announced Google Font API, are making it possible for designers and developers to finally start experimenting with typography on the web.

Where We’ve Been
The history of typography and the web is long and often frustrating. Web-standards godfather Jeffrey Zeldman wrote extensively about web fonts and standards last year and provides a good overview of the situation.

There have been two main barriers keeping variable font choices from reaching the web:

1. Browser support. CSS3 re-introduced the @font-face selector — allowing designers to specifically embed certain fonts into their stylesheets — but browser compatibility with the format of those fonts varies. There are some formats that virtually every web browser except Internet Explorer supports. Conversely, the one format Internet Explorer supports isn’t supported by any other browser.
2. The font foundries. The people that create and license fonts, have been reticent to license fonts for use on the web. The big fear is that depending on how fonts are served, users can examine the source code and steal fonts for use offline.

Until last year, these two issues pretty much left designers and font enthusiasts in a bit of a quagmire. Fortunately, things have changed and are continuing to improve.

Where We’re Going
Last May, a service called TypeKit was announced as a way to help foundries become comfortable licensing fonts, while also offering web designers embeddable fonts for their designs in a way that could work across web browsers.

TypeKit opened to the public in November and has since partnered with a growing list of foundries to give Typekit users a wider array of options.
Other web type services exist, like Kernest, Typotheque and Fontdeck (Fontdeck is still in private beta).

Most of these services use JavaScript as a way to get around the fact that not all web browsers support CSS3′s @font-face selector and to also obfuscate the original font file.

Last week, Google announced its Font API and the Google Font Directory of open source fonts that are free for developers to use in their designs.
Additionally, Google’s web fonts can be accessed from Typekit, meaning that switching between services is very easy.

While Typekit and other web font services are pushing the adoption of web fonts forward as well as getting more and more foundries (and designers and developers) comfortable with using and licensing fonts for the web, the proliferation of more web fonts does lead to some additional hurdles.