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Re: Font delivery services
Thanks jakob, a good read.
uli
font-combinator.com
Awesome! That helps font luddites like me enormously from having to download/install fonts and do exactly that task by hand in photoshop. Terrific, thanks.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
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Re: Font delivery services
A lot of great input so far.
Just some thoughts from a couple steps back…
Typography is a growing interest in web design because 1) rendering is improving in our software/devices, and 2) responsive design for multiple devices is increasingly important. The latter is relevant because it facilitates more design thinking towards sleeker designs that are mobile-first, content-out, and graphics-light.
To keep relevant, more “web designers” are starting to dabble in typography in parallel with concepts of responsive design (exciting times), and thus the plethora of articles popping up on the web about it (and note that it’s increasingly in relation to designing proportionally). Fueled, of course, by font services — like Typekit — also popping up.
I can understand the feelings about Typekit’s acquisition by Adobe (I happily stopped using Fireworks with my new laptop upgrade), but I wouldn’t write Typekit off as a solid, professional resource. Like someone pointed out, they are smart, dedicated people at Typekit, and I don’t think any of them have left yet (yet). I’ve done a little business with Typekit’s Communications Director (“a little” being the key phrase there) — who is also Editor for A Book Apart — and would like to do so again. (And Typekit are good advertisers — a-hem.)
How many people have an Adobe product installed on their machine(s)? … Rhetorical.
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Re: Font delivery services
I have a typekit account, and its good once you understand how to make it work. Its a little cumbersome having to tie it to a domain first before it will show up. I guess this is how they satisfy the Foundries over liscences for the fonts. (generally you cant distrubute them and domain locking ensures it cant be snaffled and used else were.)
Googlefonts is now a very good free alternative, and they have some fantastic fonts available. Over 400 of them actually!
Its worth noting also that if you use the likes of Fontsquirrel or roll your own custom fonts and server them from your sever rather than a third party – MIME types!!! I went round in circles for ages trying to set up custom fonts months ago. Turned out it wasnt the font. It was the stupid server refusing the serve the font file types. Have a nose around in the HTML5 boiler plate, peruse the .htaccess file for apache and the web.config for IIS (windows server) bundled with it. The mime type code is in there, amongst other gems. If you are unable to change this with your hosting, contact your hosting company and ask them nicely. They shouldnt charge you for this. If they do or say no, move to another web host, your with a bad one.
Hope this helps you out, Bloke.
CW.
Last edited by CodeWalker (2012-02-25 21:18:44)
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Re: Font delivery services
Has any used Web Fonts at fonts.com – are they any good?
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Re: Font delivery services
Whichever font you chose, from whatever service (or if you host them yourself), you’ll need to test test test them on every platform and browser you can get your hands on.
A font that looks beautiful in Mac Chrome may look horrific in Windows IE8, or vice versa. All the services I’ve used have some fonts that exhibit these problems – TypeKit, Google, Font Squirrel.
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