Adaptive Path Blog

The web is about to become a more beautiful place if our friends at Typekit have anything to say about it.

Billed as “the easiest way to use real fonts on your website”, Typekit enables web designers to use real fonts in their web designs. As simple as inserting a line of code, designers now have the ability to present their designs in a way that’s on-brand and is more aesthetically pleasing than Arial, Helvetica, San Serif.

In the past, designers had to use Flash or static images for specialized typography. They can now lean on new web standards to get the look they want. By utilizing the modern web browser’s ability to link to font files, Typekit’s service provides access to a full library of hosted fonts. This subscription service helps designers license the font they want – legally – and type designers can protect their creations without annoying DRM.

Typekit has lined up some great type foundries already, including Fonthead, Betatype, Underware, with more coming in the future. Take a peek at the library available already.

We’re particularly happy because this new company is made up of a few of our own. Bryan Mason is our former COO and a board member and Jeff Veen is one of our founders. Add Greg Veen and Ryan Carver (both of whom were helped build Measure Map) and you’ve got a great group of designers and businessmen who understand the web and the people who use it.

So, what does this mean for you? We can now keep our web designs consistent with the brands we work with. We can move beyond the standard serif and sans-serif, lowest common denominator mindset that has plagued us for years. With services like this, we can make sure our designs look and feel the way we want them to.

Typekit shows how web standards, webs designers and great type foundries can come together to move the bar forward.

Let the beautiful web begin.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 11:55 am and is filed under Interface Design, Technology, Trends, Visual Design, Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.