Trying out Typekit
A while ago I signed up to receive notifications about Typekit, a new font to web service by Small Batch Inc designed to simplify the use of commercial fonts on websites. Typekit does this without actually allowing people to download these commercial fonts, which @font-face easily lets people do. This is great news for both the web designers and the font foundries.
Typekit according to Small Batch Inc;
We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host 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.
A few days ago I received an invitation to this service and with a smile on my face I registered and decided to check what it was all about. After registering I chose what website I wanted to use Typekit on, and what font I wanted to be used with Typekit.
After a few minutes I had it all set up; which font weights I’d like, what elements the font should be assigned to and the info included in the colophon that you can access by clicking the Typekit badge in the bottom right corner. This promotional badge is optional to use when you upgrade your plan.
Image of the Typekit plans.
As seen in the image above there are 4 different plans with individual levels of features and the most important one is the font library. The different libraries are:
- Trial. Around 40 fonts.
- Personal. The trial library plus ~100 fonts.
- Full. The personal library plus another ~50 fonts.
From what I’ve read, the Personal plan would be the best option for me without paying too much for the increased bandwidth and the maximum amount of websites. That is, if I’d want to use it exclusively which I haven’t decided yet. The reason to why I haven’t decided yet is that there has been a lot of these services popping up lately and that I haven’t been able to test them all.
In comparison to another service I’ve tried, called Cufón, it is better with pseudo-classes, e.g. :hover, which means that you can style links which Cufón does not currently support.
After a few days of using Typekit the only thing I have found to be annoying is the slow transforming of the default font(s) but this is on a very lightweight website which loads fast. If I’d use a lot of images and include a lot of content I’m pretty sure that the transforming would take place during the actual load time of the website, instead of afterwards which it does here.
I’m not going to rate it until I have tried out a paid plan with more than one font on a single website and a bigger font library. What I will do is to continue to use this service because it works like a charm without making me lose my mind.
Thanks for reading,
Oscar
