Blog.Kernest.com

“Both Typekit and Kernest plan to offer new web-only fonts as a service, not a product. Traditionally, you buy a font once, you get to use it forever. Now, when you get your web fonts you’ll most likely have to pay an ongoing subscription fee for as long as you want to use them.” – Chank Diesel

Read the whole thing. It’s a good overview of web type from a font designer.

Today was packed with conversations about Kernest, @font-face, online typography, everything. A great day talking about the continued growth of online-only publications, the decline of print-based publications, the long-term impact that will have on font sales, especially those not licensed for web use.

I felt the pitch was solid and succinct.

Then as the day was wrapping up at Cocktails with Creatives, I walk into a room, and the first thing I hear:

“Everybody need a website, not everybody needs print.”

Type designers, that’s it in 8 words.

But, you already know that.

The most common argument lobbed against the adoption of @font-face is a proliferation of ugly.

A proliferation of horrid fonts.

A proliferation of web pages with horrid typography using the horrid fonts.

A general uglification of our web experience.

While it always takes a while for people to figure out how to best take advantage of a new capability. That means, a lot of @font-face misuse in the beginning – and yes a lot of ugly. But that’s the only way we’ll get to beautiful.

As was pointed out in at my UofM talk last week – good typography is bigger than font selection.

The converse is also true – a nicely drawn face like Helvetica Neue can still be asked to do some very unfortunate things.

Plus, the Proliferation of Ugly is already here:

UPDATE 20 July 2009:
The bigger issue is one of appropriateness.

Appropriate to the website’s identity.
Appropriate to the publisher’s identity.

Chances are, these identities don’t currently include any of the 12 “Web Core Fonts”. Which means the majority of websites have a very inappropriate design. Kernest is one of the efforts to resolve this.

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:


@font-face {
font-family: "Kimberley";
src: url(http://www.princexml.com/fonts/larabie/kimberle.ttf) format("truetype");


John Gruber retorts:

“The fonts you’re allowed to embed legally aren’t worth using; the fonts that are worth using aren’t embeddable.”

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.