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Down With Verdana!Typography on the Web is basic and dull. A startup called Typekit will fix it.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Monday, July 13, 2009, at 5:19 PM ET

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Mia Fineman depicted how one font changed the world, and Christopher Hawthorne analyzed how another changed the New York Times. Jason Fagone explored the DIY font-creating community. Tom Vanderbilt heralded the end of Courier, and writers you may know told of their fave fonts in which to compose (mostly Courier!).

How will Typekit block unlicensed font access? Veen says the company will use several Web-server obfuscation technologies to make sure that only those customers who've signed up for a font can use it. He's careful to note that this is not technically "digital rights management," and that some very determined crooks might be able to get around this security system. But Typekit's solution will eliminate "casual misuse," he says. The system will work much like YouTube—it will allow font companies to send their typefaces far and wide online but will still let them control their proliferation and keep detailed statistics on how their typefaces are getting used. John Allsopp, a Web developer and blogger who has consulted with Typekit, says that we might see fonts go "viral" in the same way that pictures and videos fly about the Web now. When one MySpace user finds the best emo gore font, others will follow.

Typekit is not the only startup working to make fonts widely available online; two other firms, FontDeck and Kernest, have announced similar tools. Typekit, though, has attracted the most buzz among Web designers, and it recently announced that it has raised cash from some of Silicon Valley's bright lights, including the founders of Twitter, Flickr, and Wordpress.

How will something like Typekit change the Web? For starters, pages will load faster, and they'll be much more accessible. If they want to use an exotic font, designers now must embed it in Flash or an image file. Slate's logo, for instance, is rendered in a custom font; in order to get it to display correctly in all browsers, our designers had to use something like Photoshop to render the text, then save it as an image file. Not only do these images take a lot of time to produce, they also use a lot of bandwidth coming down the pipe, and they can't be read by search engines or screen readers used by the blind. Using real fonts on the Web will eliminate these hassles.

Ultimately, technologies like Typekit offer designers a promise that the Web may one day replicate the astonishing graphical possibilities of paper. "It's kind of sad to contemplate the death of paper," says Joshua Darden. "Digital typography has quite a lot to live up to. And it needs to catch up as soon as possible."

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

Images courtesy of TypeKit.

COMMENTS

Web pages are suggestions.

It is up the browser to render the page as appropriate to the device (computer, phone, pda, ...). If the device doesn't support multiple fonts, the web page is displayed without fonts. When the page is resized, the browser adjusts the text and images. Browsers even lets the user set the default font. That is the beauty of the server/browser approach. A product has arisen for those who demand control and elimination of browser variability - Adobe Acrobat.

New browser features that add usability, like tabbed windows, are fine with me. But if the feature requires a change in the web content, not just user actions, then any benefit will be outweighed by the Balkanization of the browser marketplace. Any web page that says "to view this page correctly you need to run browser x and version y" probably isn't worth viewing.

-- drwisdom
(To reply, click here)

I understand your theory, but I don't see how fonts would violate it. When you visit Slate or any other site your Web browser downloads all kinds of images and Flash. You can tell your browser not to do so. But the default is for it to display these items.

Fonts would be no different. Your browser would download fonts to display them, but, like everything else, you could turn them off.

-- Farhad Manjoo
(To reply, click here)

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