Thank You Kardesım
People look at me funny when I say that the web has been at war with typeface freedom since it's inception. I suppose I may be exaggerating, after all no one is bombing comic sans into oblivion using a "slab tank," but you would have to agree that if nothing else we have had a lot of beautiful typefaces held hostage when it comes to the practical use of them in our design.
Because we are forced to use a select few typefaces we are limited in not only our creativity, but also in how we can best represent a brand that dares select a corporate font that falls outside of the 15 - 20 "safe" fonts to use on their website.
Now don't get me wrong, there are some work around methods out there. Hell some of them are even pretty good, but none of them are great. They almost all rely on some form of javascript or server side processing and it never works as well as actual web text.
For a long time this has looked like the best solution to our typographic toils. Now we can embed fonts into our websites and if users don't have them it simply gets downloaded to their computer, brilliant! What a huge advance in web technology! It may shock you that it has been supported by IE of all browsers since version 5.5. Yes, yes, we have actually been waiting for so called "modern" browsers to adopt the technology before we got to the point we could use it.
Poking fun at browsers aside we can now use @font-face safely and expect that a majority of our users will be able to experience the new fonts. Only there is another problem, a problem that actually was a part of @font-face's solution.
Downloading fonts onto a users computer that doesn't hasn't purchased the rights to them? Whoops, that is a copyright violation.
A nice selection of fonts to chose from
As it stands we can't use commercial fonts and typefaces using this method. There is no license that I am aware of that allows you to freely distribute a font after purchase. So we are limited to using freely distributed fonts. As desperate as this situation may sound it is actually OK because there are some pretty good free typefaces ones out there (thank you dedicated type designers, I love your work).
What actually becomes the challenge is finding these quality typefaces. Beyond finding them there is some effort in converting the typefaces for IE, hosting them and integrating them into your CSS.
Typekit aims to free us of the restrictive "web safe fonts" as well as make the process easy and effortless. Sure there are some sites out there that list @font-face safe fonts but typekit takes it not just one step further, but four. How do they make it four steps further you ask?
Easy to integrate into your website
Price points
The trial account is just that, a trial. You can use two fonts on a single website and don't have access to the full library. However the upgraded accounts are really quite inexpensive ranging from $24 - $250 per year ($20 a month isn't so bad). With upgrades you get to use the kit on additional websites and have access to a larger font library.
My only complaint would be that there is no "unlimited" option. For those of us who run agencies it is conceivable that over time we would need to use the service on more than 40 sites and purchasing multiple accounts could get messy.
The product is a solid concept and is well executed. The extra effort to make it more than a repository of free licensed fonts goes a long way.
Let us know if you think the service is something you would use and pay for, or what you would improve about it.
Have some feedback? Leave a commentThank You Kardesım
thnk you admin
I’ll try trial to see if comes in handy for my kinda work.
Hi Alessandro,
The $250 a year gets you access to a full font library that can be used on a large number of websites. It actually ends up being pretty economical.
You always have the option of using the CC licensed fonts yourself with out a service like TypeKit and that is for free…
Right now, it sucks.
You pay 250$ per year for the use of one typeface… when with 500$ you can buy it and use an image replacement tecnique.
When will we able to use it correctly? In around 5 years… I’m going to cry…
Ah you are correct Eren, missed that. Thanks for the heds up.
That does sound like a pretty good solution. Its true that the limitations of the web in terms of fonts is pretty restricting and reduces the powers of creativity. So I’m definitely open to a solution such as this, even if it means paying a small amount.
Invites? Didn’t they go live a few days ago which means everyone can just register? 
on February 1, 2010
nice review!!!!!!!