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Serving Fonts: Typekit

JA September 14

Typekit is a project that has been buzzing around the works since May, and the word out on the web is that it’s about to 'become the YouTube of fonts’. The platform is the brainchild of Jeff Veen (the guru behind Google Analytics) and his team at Small Batch Inc. The site isn’t up and running yet, but there is a blog charting its progress, and its premise can basically be explained as follows.

Web typography is fast becoming an artform all in itself, with designers hungry to access a range of fonts that will make their sites more functional, beautiful, innovative and user-friendly. Earlier problems with embedding are being ironed out and it is now relatively easy to link to a font via CSS and @font-face.

There is however, one hitch: copyright. The industry faces the same problems as writers, artists and musicians across the board. Type designers (or foundries as they’re also called) are concerned that their work will simply be pirated and so are reluctant to allow for linking via CSS on the web. Evidently, this presents a problem for designers.

Typekit hopes to offer a solution. Veen and his crew have ‘built a technology platform that … host[s] 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’. Through a ‘web-only font linking license’, Typkit hopes to open up the field for all involved.

Some, like Mike Davidson, have touted Typekit as ‘the best thing to happen to web design since the re-emergence of browser competitiveness’. Yet others, like UX designer Kyle Meyer, are sceptical: ‘If the technology to link typefaces exists, designers can and will do so regardless of licensing. This will become the same battle DRM has been for the music and film industries, with the same outcome’. Typekit has also been criticised for its reliance on JavaScript.

Veen is not so naïve as to think that the fonts uploaded onto Typkit will not be pirated. Rather, he hopes to discourage casual misuse through a strategy taken from old military tactics called ‘defence in depth’. By putting ‘dozens and dozens’ of small hurdles (segmenting and subsetting, HTTP referrer checking, obfuscation etc.), Veen hopes to wear down the majority of would-be pirates.

For an in-depth walk-through on Typekit, have a look at for a beautiful web and i love typography, both of whom were asked to give the project a test-run.

26-15 pivotal web typography


 

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