Great news for anyone who cares about great-looking Web content: Adobe and Typekit are now offering a selection of Adobe typefaces for use in Web browsers. Christopher Slye from the type team explains:
Every popular Web browser now supports font delivery over the web (via the CSS @font-face rule), giving designers more typographic options than ever before. We here at Adobe have been looking for the best way to get some of our most popular designs to you, so today we’re excited to announce a partnership with Typekit, the Web font pioneers of San Francisco who, since last year, have been leading the way in web font technology and delivery.
He goes on to share some details on the typefaces now offered:
Everyone knows Myriad and Minion — pervasive workhorse sans serif and serif typefaces, respectively, which will prove to be as useful on the Web as they have been in print. Thomas Phinney’s Hypatia Sans and Carol Twombly’s Chaparral are distinctive and versatile. Adobe Text is Robert Slimbach’s newest design which a lot of people haven’t even seen yet (so far it has only been available as a registration benefit for CS5 customers) but I’m certain it will quickly establish itself as a flexible and reliable text typeface, and I’m pleased it will now get a wider audience.
Richard Lipton’s classic Bickham Script is one of our most popular display typefaces and a distinctive addition to the Adobe Web Fonts collection. More of Robert Slimbach’s work now available for Web use include Adobe Garamond, Caflisch Script, Cronos, and the “display” designs for Garamond Premier (based on Claude Garamond’s beautiful Gros Canon type).
For complete details on browser support, licensing, etc., check out the project FAQ.
can these be used in Adobe Flash created websites, or is this limited to html and css sites?
This is for html only. If you have the Creative Suite, you already have (some|all?) of those fonts so it’s not a problem for flash.
After a quick read of the Typekit site, it was still not clear whether I can create multiple webkits per site (or need to), or whether I’m paying only for one webkit at a time, or whether it’s going to be accurately WYSIWYG in Dreamweaver.
It’s also not clear how far-reaching this approach will be. If someone were to publish a public domain or GNU set of delicious fonts, and it really caught on, wouldn’t that eliminate much of the value of Typekit?
It’s also not clear what happens when my subscription lapses. If I have published sits using Typekit, will they fall back to conventional fonts? Do I have to stay subscribed for the fonts to keep working?
Unfortunately, there is no FAQ on their site, or I wouldn’t be asking so many questions (rhetorically, of course) here.
@Allen, Google already has a repository of free fonts, although the selection is pretty limited for now – http://code.google.com/webfonts
If/When your subscription lapses, the site will fallback to whatever font you specified in the font familiy stack in CSS.
Personally, I’d prefer to buy the fonts directly from Adobe for a DECENT fee and host it on my own site. Relying on third-party services always makes me nervous.
This is pretty good. I’ve looked at the trial version of TypeKit when it launched a year ago, but having chosen Myriad for my stock sans-serif company font, there was no incentive to pay for their services.
With this morning’s announcement, I have immediately signed up for the $25/year edition and it took me all of 10 minutes to update my website using the font from Typekit.
Job well done!
Kai the body text on your site looks terrible for some reason, as does the headline text. It looks like viewing text on a faulty monitor. You get a brief flash of nicely rendered text, then it is replaced by what I guess is your chosen font.
That’s in FF + Opera on PC, not got my Mac with me to test in OSX
Very nice, but not free. Conclusion: #fail
[Seriously? Everything should be free, and we should “make it up on volume”? –J.]
I use the Cufon library, which is free (with properly licensed fonts), and works like a charm. I’d love to use a built-in browser solution, but our organization doesn’t have any budget, so this solution is out.
The best way to entice people to get on board with a technology is to offer it for free, at least for a while, then charge for it; even then, make it free for students/edu orgs. It’s not a matter of making everything free; rather, you’d get more developers to at least try it that way.
For years I wanted to convince my old organization to use Flex, but at $15 grand per CPU (in 2004), there was no way. Then, Adobe/Macromedia came to its senses and at least gave away the SDK for free; now it’s a widely-accepted technology for RIA.
I love Adobe technologies and want to see this succeed; that’s the reason I make this argument. Let developers get their feet wet with it and you’ll be surprised how many will get hooked 🙂