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For years designers have been left frustrated by the lack of supported fonts on the web, they have seen beautiful designers hampered by a lack of proper font support. But things may be changing.

“Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. For designers and developers, this is a significant step forward. No longer will you need to trap your content in images or Flash just to express yourself visually. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable. This is a massive upgrade for the web.”
(http://blog.typekit.com/2009/05/27/introducing-typekit/)

this is all well and good, but what about the legality of this? All fonts are protected by copyright, and very few allow you to link to them via CSS. However, a new application called Typekit (http://typekit.com/) has come onto the scene that claims to have “been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.” This is all very exciting and has been causing a bit of a stir in the web design community. As Andy Clarke puts it “Typekit will revolutionize the way that we work with, and purchase typefaces in the same way that iTunes revolutionized the way we buy and listen to music and the App Store opened the doors to millions of iPhone/iPod customers for their developer community.” (http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/why_typekit_will_change_everything)

In the wake of the buzz about typekit, there have been other services that have been popping up promising to provide a similar solution to web typography, and this is going to have a major impact on the way that designers are going to be designing, using and paying for fonts. Typotheque (http://www.typotheque.com/) have put together a bespoke solution handling fonts from their own foundry, and it could be that others follow down this path.

Whilst this per-foundry approach could find an audience, the ideal solution is one like typekit that has a more uniform solution covering multiple foundries. One other solution that is gathering some interest is Fontdeck (http://fontdeck.com/) a solution being put together by Clearleft (http://clearleft.com/) and OmniTi (http://omniti.com/), and with those heavy-hitters behind it, could be the one to watch.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions, such as what kind of pricing model these services will employ, and what kind of reliability and speed we can expect from the service, but With the arrival of these new services the future appears bright for online typography.