I originally published this at MNteractive.com on March 31, 2008 (just about a year ago). It still accurately illustrates my thinking and it felt appropriate to post here
Typography was my first design love.
A well chosen typeface, used effectively, is like a the score of a movie. Adding richness and tone to the underlying story.
Unfortunately, here in web browser land we’ve only got a few good notes; Helvetica (1957), Verdana (1996), Georgia (1993),
Online typography doesn’t exist today. Full stop.
If we assume browser-based publishing will be the primary form of graphic design moving forward and the easiest form to-be-typographers will cut their teeth on, we have effectively reduced their piano to 3 keys. All of which are older than modern browsers.
Today, WebKit supports downloadable custom fonts. Netscape 4.0, IE 4.0 also did a decade ago.
Yet for 10 years, we’ve had the same browser typeface choices.
The same 3 notes over and over and over and over.
No wonder when Stefan Hartwig asked me what my favorite typefaces were, I was stumped for a minute. For my entire professional career, I’ve had the same choices.
Yes, this is an extension of a post I wrote 18 months ago:
Typeface Licensing, For Those Who Think Music Licensing is Easy.
My proposal is the opposite of Andrei Michael Herasimchuk’s plea to Adobe.
I want a YouTube of typefaces. Easily created, open to everyone to easily embed-able.
We already have the CSS code to use the custom typefaces:
John Gruber retorts:
Visit MySpace lately? Quality is mostly irrelevant.
Things we need for this to happen:
1. Free and easy to use typeface creation tools
2. Typefaces with licensed for this use (CC, public domain, lots of choices here)
3. Typefaces to be embedded in webpages
Without it, typography might as well be added to obsoleteskills.com, and type foundries will only have themselves to blame for their lack of a market.
Thanks to @stefanhartwig and @arikjones for inspiring this post.
UPDATE April 03, 2008.
German type foundary FDI fonts.info releases Graublau Sans Web free for web embedding. Progress.
Aren’t we, the creative classes, too late? The typography industry is so tied to the printing of fonts that we forgot that we might need them on the screen as well. Maybe there isn’t enough demand?
Norm, fair point. From my perspective we have 0 supply – I’m not confident in any measure of demand, until the fonts licensed for this use start getting some exposure.
Typography, like design itself, influences in a silent way.
You could argue that many people’s stated distaste for “reading long things online” is, in part, a type issue.
I would say that the type industry has done nothing to help itself out. They should be organized and pushing this stuff through the W3C in an active way.