Adrian has a post titled Five Steps to Font Freedom on the Be A Design Group blog. I’ve quoted some of it below:
There is something absurd about typography on the web. Think about these scenarios: You don’t need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don’t need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don’t need to own Times to read the Times. You don’t need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane. And yet this same logic doesn’t apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser. You are reading Arial right now. That’s right, Arial. Why? Because everybody on Earth has a licensed version of Arial on their computer. The great democracy of the internet has failed to produce typography any better than the least common denominator of system fonts. As a designer, I hope you are outraged and offended. So what can you do about it?
Those who know me (or have seen me speak) know that I feel pretty strongly about the lack of variety in widely distributed fonts. Almost every page uses one of the same five fonts (Verdana, Georgia, Arial, Lucida Sans, or Times). The lack of variety can make it tough to create strong branding and beautiful designs on the web.
Designers tend to work around this issue by creating text in Photoshop or Illustrator and exporting to an image. Flash also provides the ability to use fonts that aren’t locally installed (this is the key to the popular Sifr technique). Unfortunately neither technique works well for reading long documents.
The release of Vista will help (but not solve the issue) for two reasons:
- New high-quality fonts: Poynter was the first to show the new Microsoft fonts being distribute with Vista (some will be distributed with Office as well). All six of the new fonts are OpenType, and will provide much needed variety from the current popular Windows fonts.
- Font embedding in WPF: I haven’t had a chance to write a blog entry about this, but you can embed fonts into your WPF/Avalon application (even ones hosted in the browser). Many fonts provide licensing terms that allow you to freely embed and redistribute a font in an application (the WPF SDK will provide several free fonts from Ascender for this purpose).
Adrian proposes some solutions — but one thing he’s missing is reliable technology for font embedding in web browsers. IE has this feature but you don’t see it used much. Probably due to a combination of the following issues:
- Download size for quality fonts: Embedding a high-quality font can easily balloon a page size
- Lack of embeddable fonts: Not all fonts are licensed for embedding
- No cross-browser support: I’m not sure how much this was the issue, since many other IE-only features were adopted before they had cross-browser support
