TypeKit is making waves (not these waves) in the web design community about a new service they will be launching later this summer. The beauty of typekit’s innovation is only partially technical. The real innovation will be in the business model: making it easier/less painful to license high quality fonts and reward the creators.
Clike here to be notified when TypeKit launches (they plan on offering free fonts as well).
Big change:
Every major browser is about to support 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.
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.
Opportunity:
Designers want higher quality and more varied fonts to use on the web. Font designers want to get paid for their craft.
Solution:
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 to 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.
Update: Checkout an early mockup of TypeKit’s home page (Not sure why I think this is so cool – probably the mix between a new business model (renting fonts) and a cloud service)
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