Focus on Typekit

Working in a creative industry it's normal to make hundreds of decisions a day about the way something looks, and using the right font is often a crucial step in determining whether the outcome of a design is seamless or substandard. Typography is the age old technique of arranging type to make language more legible and visible, but today more than ever its crucial to look at how we use it in our work and the kind of impact it can make. All fonts have a personality, and with this comes the power to set the tone of your work. But with web design it has often been the case that the online aspect of typography has been overlooked, and web designers have not been given the same level of freedom and choice with their use of fonts as print designers. But with digital and online environments becoming such an integral part of our daily lives, it became clear that this was something that needed to evolve.

Here's where Typekit comes in. They are innovators of web typography, finally allowing designers to use more aesthetically relevant and appropriate type to enhance user's online experiences. If you use Typekit or know of them, you may have heard their big news this month - they were acquired by software company Adobe. 

They offer a pioneering subscription service that allows beautiful, high quality fonts to be embedded into websites. This is a huge step up from the days of web designers being restricted to using just a few basic web-safe fonts, which was a huge hurdle when trying to be creative with designs for online use. 

What the takeover means for Typekit isn't immediately obvious, but opinion is divided as to whether this will enhance or disrupt the valued service they created. It could see an increased ease of integrating web fonts into your work, and the availability of many more of Adobe's popular fonts. Recent browsers can support Typekit's CSS3 code allowing it to be widely used, and through hosting their fonts, they can assure that there is high compatibility across browsers and devices. And with over 3 billion fonts being served last month, it seems as though they're on to a winner.