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SitePoint Design View |
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| Issue 60: 16th June, 2008 The Useful and the Usable in Web Design | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Introduction
Cast your mind back just two issues and you might remember me writing about
the use of non-standard fonts and mentioning the unicorn-like
Well, two months can be a long, long time in web years. We suddenly seem to have an exciting and, more importantly, viable solution to using non-standard web fonts -- one that will be usable almost immediately. Oh, happy day!
We'll look at how it works and some of the pros and cons below. Enjoy.
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Typekit: Promising or Promised Land?
"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away they had perfect font
support and they used In that glorious world, birds twittered gaily, the sun shone warmly, and designers attached fonts to their page with a single line of code and without fear of licensing repercussions. Unfortunately, we don't live there." Design View #58 - April 2009Little did we know when I wrote that in April that we might be closer to that glorious world than we ever suspected.
As a quick refresher, you might remember that the technology was never really
the issue when it came to web-linking fonts. Attaching fonts to your CSS was as simple as using
the @font-face {
font-family: Echelon;
src: url('echelon.otf');
}
Then just calling on it using the h3 { font-family: Echelon,
sans-serif;
}
No sir, the real showstopper was always the licensing issues. Whenever you link to a font file in your CSS, it's impossible to avoid making it available for anyone else to download, install, and use. Unsurprisingly, companies who make and sell type for a living are about as unhappy about this as companies who make and sell movies, music, or photostock are when they see you distributing their products -- without somehow lining their pockets. Typekit is the first serious attempt to manage these licensing issues and arguably its biggest accomplishment is enticing some of the important type foundries to play along. Till now, the foundries seem to have generally thrown their hands up and given in when it comes to the Web. Typekit provides a way for them to market their fonts without losing control of them. Here's How It Works 1) Typekit negotiates paid licensing agreements with a range of commercial type houses to host their fonts on the Typekit servers. 2) Developers and web site owners pay a license fee to Typekit for use of a specific font on a given domain name. They then link the font directly from the Typekit servers.
3) When users request a page using the linked font, Typekit only serves the font if it's called from a licensed domain. 4) As Internet Explorer only supports the linking of Embedded OpenType (EOT) font format, Typekit also provides an EOT font file to any Microsoft browser. Obviously any time you link a file from a third-party site -- whether that's a JPEG, ZIP, MP3, or TTF -- you run the risk of the file being blocked when access to that server is unavailable. However, no disaster there, providing you've chosen an appropriate fallback font. In effect, you'll be no worse off than you are at the moment. So, if this works, should you just host the fonts on the same web server as the site? Here, we return to those tricky licensing issues. Even fonts that are considered free rarely have an explicitly defined agreement on CSS web linking. Some allow distribution on font sites, but is that the same as web linking? Some require attribution of the author, which is difficult with a web linked font. Others allow for "personal use only." Typekit's goal is to remove that legal ambiguity. Simply pay your fee and forget about it. Exactly how that fee structure might work is unclear at the moment, but we'll speculate on that in the second part. Read Kev's blog entry on the announcement:
Online Marketing Inside Out Kick-start your business Order a copy now for just $29.95!FREE BONUS: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, by Darren Rowse (worth $19.95) Type: Artwork or Tool?At the moment the biggest gray area with Typekit is the pricing model. The problem with type is it has always been difficult to define exactly what it is you're buying. Type as a Tool
The expense of purchasing, storing, and managing letter press type dictated that there was no sense in owning more than a few sets to use on all print work. Choice of typeface was not a real design option for the designer. In that sense, you could argue type was a printer's tool of the trade, much like a carpenter's hammer. The printer made a one-off purchase and the type foundry had no expectations about any further payments each time their typeface was used. As technologies like linotype, phototypesetting, and (later) desktop publishing systems developed, it gradually became easier to own and manage dozens, even hundreds of fonts. As our desktop software arrives pre-tooled with library of ready-to-use fonts, it's difficult for us to see them as any different from the pen tool or the marquee -- just another design tool. Type as Artwork
When we purchase an image there's no expectation to have open slather in using it forever; it simply gives us the right to use that image within an item of work -- print, online, or otherwise. Typographers certainly put as much, if not more, skill and effort into their creations as any illustrator or photographer, so there's a rock solid argument that that they should be recompensed via the same payment model. Nonetheless, old habits die hard, and it will probably some take time for some of us to change the way we view type and it's value. Type as a Service As I understand it, Typekit has already indicated it intends to have a sliding payment scale; for example, Google would pay a lot more to use Gill Sans on their search results than your sister would to use Gill Sans on her hilarious cats blog. What if you could buy yearly subscriptions to some of the fonts that you particularly liked using? That base subscription fee might allow you to provide the font to up to 100,000 unique users per month -- regardless of how many domains or pages you used that font across. Then, if you ticked over your base limit, you would go to the next tier in the payment system. If you were to stop paying your subscription then sure, the font potentially disappears across a range of sites. But we're already well-acquainted with the idea that domain registrations and hosting deals DO expire if we fail to pay them, and I would think both those situations are far more catastophic than losing your preferred typeface. So, what would you be prepared to pay for?
Of course, at the moment this is all just speculation but we might know a little bit more soon. For those of you reading this in New York before Wednesday night, Jeff Veen and Bryan Mason are doing a live demo of Typekit:
Make your way down there and give us a field report. There'll be plenty of us interested in your views. Follow @99designs on twitter
Tips for
designers That's all for this issue -- thanks for reading! I'll see you in a few weeks.
Alex Walker |
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Welcome to Design View #60.
Typekit
The
first typefaces were cast metal so purchasing type meant you were
buying a big box of metal blocks.
By now,
most of us are familiar with the stock photography pricing model.
Does your
web host offer all the features you need? Akash Mehta puts six
developer-friendly web hosts through their paces. Which reigns supreme?
The
Internet landscape has changed over the past few years, and the rules of online
marketing have changed with it. In this excerpt from his latest book, Brandon
spells out how to create and distribute an effective press release.
With
ColdFusion and Flex, it's easy to produce nifty Rich Internet Applications. In
this article, Kai Koenig gives us the solid grounding needed to build a well
architected RIA. Plus, take our quiz and score a free copy of Getting Started
with Flex!
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