Type (in the right hands)

As a print designer at heart, I have always had a strong interest in typography. Bad font choices make me shudder. While, of course, it is definitely a subjective thing, some people can do some real damage with a long list of type options in their arsenal. There really is no need to litter your Microsoft Word documents with Comic Sans and Brush Script just because you can. It's not creative, it's just tacky. A little restraint goes a long, looong way.

However, when in the right hands, magical things can happen with type. Check out these little gems, which you can see featured along with other examples at inspiredology.com :






Options in web typography, which used to be nonexistent when browsers first debuted, are now becoming more available (or I should say, are TRYING to become more available) to designers. There are a lot of different ideas (and concerns) floating around right now. The biggest hurdle is how to make the fonts available to the designers for on-screen delivery to the viewer without being able to be downloaded, which would leave our fabulous font designers broke and living on the streets. No bueno.

There have been a couple attempts, like Microsoft's EOT, to get around this problem. But it was never fully supported by the type foundries and never picked up by the majority of browsers. On the other hand, there are some work-arounds that will allow some fonts to be used (using @font-face), which is now becoming widely supported by browsers but still leaves vulnerabilities for font pilfering.

While all this gets worked out, a handful of sites have stepped up in the interim (and I'm sure they hope to stick around a little bit longer…) to allow licensing of fonts that they host and designers can tap into using the @font-face property. The majority of them are pretty well stocked, opening tons of options for web typography. But it comes with a price. One of the most well known of the bunch, typekit.com, offers the service for between $7-$49/month depending on bandwidth usage and the number of fonts you want available. Oh, and they limit the number of sites you are able to use the fonts on, also dependent on your level of subscription.

While the lure of having these fonts at my disposal was tempting at first, in retrospect I'm glad I didn't jump the gun and pop in my credit card number (as I am often so guilty of doing…). I really think I would only would use it for decorative text, not body copy, so image replacement works fine for now in these instances until a more solid solution is worked out that doesn't require another monthly subscription. Until then, basic web safe fonts are good with me.