Typekit Blog

This is a known bug where Chrome 33 renders webfonts blank: http://blog.typekit.com/2014/02/28/new-bug-in-chrome-v33-affecting-web… It usually goes away with a soft refresh. This was measurably affecting our conversion rate, so we actually added a hack that forced Chrome to re-render all the text: https://gist.github.com/asolove/9553196

http://designfestival.com/ http://blog.typekit.com/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ http://methodandcraft.com/ http://webdesignerwall.com/ http://www.netmagazine.com/ http://webdesignledger.com/ http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/ http://www.alistapart.com/ http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/ Should be enough to get you started.

The biggest problem might be compatibility, old computers (common in China) only contain fonts that have low quality Roman parts like SimSun (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%98%93%E5%AE%8B%E4%BD%93) but this font is default Chinese typeface in Windows. The newly designed fonts in recent years for Chinese have much better Roman parts which are already distributed by operating system or could obtained for free: - Microsoft YaHei in Windows http://www.fonts.com/font/microsoft-corporation#product_top - Hiragino Sans GB in Mac (http://blog.jjgod.org/2009/06/04/updates-on-font-changes-in-snow-leopa… - Source Han Sans free from Adobe (http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/) Many Chinese websites have already using one of them as their default font. There are also a dozen of commercial Chinese fonts which contain higher quality Roman typeface (although could not catch up most classic ones). And for professionals (like book publishers or designers) in China, they often combine one Chinese font and one Roman font in their product for better result. (e.g. FZNew ShuSong + Sabon for Serif).

Just what my eyes told me when I looked at the page. Looking now at the Typekit site (where the font comes from) I see that Adelle, indeed, is not recommended for body text by Typekit, only for headings. The Typekit site offers some short explanations about what these recommendations mean: Fonts recommended for paragraph text: “Recommended for continuous text at small sizes, these fonts possess a generous x-height and are manually hinted to perform well across operating systems.” Fonts recommended for headings: “Recommended for short text at medium to large sizes, these fonts are generally more decorative and often served with PostScript outlines for improved rendering.” A good place to start reading if you are interested in this is a post at the Typekit site again, part of a series on web fonts and font rendering: http://blog.typekit.com/2010/12/17/type-rendering-review-and-fonts-tha… It includes this: “All of the fonts tagged Paragraph have been manually hinted to look great on screen at text sizes in every major browser/OS mix. Use these recommendations to make informed decisions about how well a font will render, knowing that they are backed up by Typekit’s font diagnostic tools.” More generally: I have found that often—I’m tempted to say more often than not, but I have not the data to back this up—designs using web fonts are worse than they would be without web fonts. When you consider how complex the issue of good rendering across devices and…

I don't see how that would affect a screenshot—the difference is clearly visible in screenshots. Furthermore the differences between Mac, Linux, and Window font rendering are widely discussed on the internet. I think I just prefer the way that Apple chose to render fonts. This blog post seems to lay out the tradeoff between, at least, Windows and Mac font rendering: https://blog.typekit.com/2010/10/15/type-rendering-operating-systems/

Source Code Pro was my go to for a long time ( https://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/source-code-pro/ gets into the design of it) - the 1Il|iO0oB8 set is where its most interesting to me (and why I liked it). However, when Jetbrains Mono came out, I switched my code editors to it (IntelliJ was trivial) - https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ (and no, I don't like ligatures). The slightly larger lowercase high at the same font size makes it a bit easier to read without boosting the entire editor's font size up, the 'g' debate I lean to the single story, open tail form ( https://www.typeroom.eu/the-elusive-mystery-of-letter-g-explained ).

Well by gosh, I am old enough to remember Adobe Multiple Masters… https://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silver-anniver… …a technology which went absolutely nowhere. Makes me glad to see Helvetica is now available as variable, as well as a non-trivial number of open-source fonts. https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true&sort=popularity (Still waiting for Roboto, though. Slab and mono are there, the main sans isn’t yet, which is too bad.)

I believe the Source family only recently got smallcaps, in 2017: https://blog.typekit.com/2017/01/10/introducing-source-serif-2-0/ So you need to upgrade. The Gothic drop cap is nothing to do with Source, but it is from Deutsche Zierschrift, one of 5 drop cap fonts (Cheshire Initials, Deutsche Zierschrift, Goudy Initialen, Kanzlei Initialen, & Yinit). In one of the clever performance tricks we use (https://www.gwern.net/About#design), we subset them all into multiple font files, one initial per file, which makes them almost free in terms of bandwidth. The CSS for positioning them is quite tricky, however, due to subtle brokenness in browsers (particularly Firefox), so you'll have to inspect the 'DROP CAPS' section of https://www.gwern.net/static/css/default.css carefully if you want to imitate it.

Looks like it's related to their use of TypeKit for fonts. I haven't used TypeKit in a while, but it looks like they had this issue a year ago [1]. Unclear if it has been fixed or what. A lot of people I know simply embed the font in the page (ugh) [1] https://blog.typekit.com/2016/06/03/regarding-the-flash-of-unstyled-te…

More info about the variable format: https://blog.typekit.com/2016/09/14/variable-fonts-a-new-kind-of-font-…

nice work. a large family like this is very well suited to be a variable font[1] -- even the slabs could be an axis. 1. https://blog.typekit.com/2016/09/14/variable-fonts-a-new-kind-of-font-…

Correct, Adobe finished the MM specification in 1991 and released the first fonts in 1992[0]. Apple in 1995 released QuickDraw GX, which included a new font architecture called TrueType GX, a complete reworking of font architecture. As well as including MM-style font variations, it also decoupled glyphs from characters, such that multiple characters could use the same glyph, or multiple glyphs could be available for the same character.[1] While GX was a market failure, many of these technologies resurfaced in OpenType, though variations specifically did not. Microsoft acknowledge that OpenType Font Variations is directly based off Apple's work in QuickDraw GX font variations. [0] http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silver-annivers… [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickDraw_GX#Typography

A side note about that website. Thin and Extra-Thin fonts have no place in web design (there are some exceptions in huge title text). They are an unnecessary burden for people with limited eyesight and elderly people[1]. Even for me, on my 1366x768 screen (which is still the single most common resolution for cheap notebooks, dear HiDPI web designers[2]), the bullet text is hardly readable, the copyright line is completely unreadable. This effect is made even worse by choosing inadequate contrasts[3]. One can use subtle colors for increased contrast.[4] [1] http://www.aiga.org/typography-and-the-aging-eye [2] http://blog.typekit.com/2013/05/01/hi-dpi-typography/ [3] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/ [4] https://www.viget.com/articles/color-contrast

More at TypeKit: http://blog.typekit.com/2016/09/14/variable-fonts-a-new-kind-of-font-f…

It refers to a waterlock, as explained in the linked Tim Brown blog post: http://blog.typekit.com/2016/08/17/flexible-typography-with-css-locks/

There's some CJK sample on Adobe Typekit blog http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/

I thought that too might prevent foundries to license their fonts, but it turns out that services like typekit are in fact already putting these fonts online, without any real guarantee against pirating. It's just not very convenient to do right now, but definitely doable, as stated by typekit themselves : http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fonts-on-the… So, if foundries are allowing that on the web, why the special treatment in native apps? That is one of the points of the article.

This is similar to how TypeKit serve their fonts. They wrote a blog post explaining their reasoning: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/08/11/better-web-font-loading-with-javasc…

Their linked blog mentions a partnership with Google regarding some of the fonts offered. http://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/introducing-adobe-edge-web-fonts/ With that said and paranoia of external asset serving/hosting, does anyone know if these fonts can be self-hosted?

You're right, but you're about a year late. http://blog.typekit.com/2011/10/03/adobe-acquires-typekit/

yes, I have seen this behavior before.. what font size were you running each at? Try changing the Inconsolata font size, I'll bet it fixes it. if I'm right, take a look at: http://blog.typekit.com/2010/12/14/a-closer-look-at-truetype-hinting/ and ctrl-f to 'delta' for a partial explanation of what's happening.

I believe that is due to the work they explain in this blog post: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/07/26/new-from-typekit-improved-font-rend…

I think it's in the TrueType hinting: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/03/16/skolar-web-hinted-for-better-screen…

From a historical perspective, this certainly feels like a logical, organic acquisition for both Typekit and Adobe. But it's disappointing that they didn't exit into the arms of Google. Google Web Fonts could have used the help and passion. They apparently danced, but unfortunately didn't leave the ball together: http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.html http://blog.typekit.com/2010/05/19/typekit-and-google/ It's unlikely this will result in the kind of innovation or even disruption that a Google/Typekit union could have provided. Edit: Removed unnecessarily negative language.

Typekit seems to be trying to get foundries to care about this, every now and then types get improved, like this: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/03/16/skolar-web-hinted-for-better-screen…

Now that iOS 4.2 is out Typekit has changed how we support for iOS devices. We've stopped supporting iOS3 and earlier, which means users that haven't upgraded yet won't get browser crashes. There's more details at http://blog.typekit.com/2010/12/06/updates-to-typekits-mobile-support/ but to summarize, you should probably republish the kit for your site.

In the latest iPad firmware, WebKit supports TrueType web fonts (http://blog.typekit.com/2010/11/23/ios-4-2-improves-support-for-web-fo… I think that makes it feasible to write an ePub reader that renders to WebKit, and does support WebFonts (or does iBooks support that already in the new firmware?) That is not quite 'install custom fonts,', but it would be good enough for some use cases.

In short: It's the typekit fonts. I had experimental iPad/iPhone support enabled, which works fine with iOS 4 Mobile Safari but likes crashing previous Mobile Safari versions. I just disabled it. http://blog.typekit.com/2010/04/05/experimenting-with-web-fonts-on-the… Long version: we have a dedicated mobile version of the site but we never got around to updating that before the launch so we disabled it.. had some other issues too and the content was all outdated. So a mobile friendly version of the site will be built soonish. I just wish jQuery Mobile was here already so I could build it with that. :)

Adobe used to have this feature in their typeface format and type design tools in the 1990s. The format was called “Multiple Master”, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts and http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silver-annivers… (Metafont also has this feature.) In practice, type designers found that making such fonts took dramatically more work, and typographers/publishers weren’t willing to pay commensurately more money. So it didn’t see much adoption outside Adobe. As a result, the format died out, and we stuck with descendants of the original PostScript font format. More recently, many companies (but especially Adobe) ship “pro” typefaces with separate fonts for various “optical sizes”. Again, producing these takes a lot of extra work, so most type designers don’t bother with it, and because it is designed to work with standard tools (which don’t have special knowledge of the feature), typographers/designers must explicitly choose which optical size they want to use in each context. So in theory it’s inferior to the Multiple Master format, but in practice it is backwards compatible, which ends up being more important. Apple can solve this problem for their UI fonts specifically, because they have full control. Unfortunately, they haven’t offered these features for use with other typefaces.

I'm actually a bit conflicted about support for DRM schemes in HTML5. I absolute loathe DRM and I wish every damn publisher of every damn type would come to their senses and actually sell DRM-free digital products. However, there is one case where some form of "DRM" does make sense, and that's actual renting - or more specifically, the popular case of "catalog subscription" (ala Spotify, Netflix and so on). You're clearly renting access to a catalog of goods in this kind of model, and therefore it makes sense that you'd want to stop people from permanently acquiring copies in such a scenario, especially if you're selling actual DRM-free downloads at the same time (in my ideal digital store where it makes sense they would offer both of these side-by-side). The catalog subscription model has some clear value to it, and I'd hate for it to disappear due to "technical unfeasibility". As such, I would at least prefer for most of the tech / architecture to be based on HTML5 stuff instead of closed plugins like Flash, Silverlight, Widevine and so on. I can't really think of a good solution to this, unless you got the big wigs at various publishing outlets to accept that to do HTML5 streaming, you can only make downloading the rentable versions inconvenient for regular versions (instead of being able to use a heavy-weight closed DRM plugin), but I'm afraid that could be quite challenging. It has worked for Adobe and webfonts, though[1], so maybe there's hope. Forcing HTML5 to be…