Typekit & Web Fonts
| September 28th, 2009
If you haven’t heard of Typekit it’s definitely worth taking a moment and poking around the website. In a nutshell, they want to expand the capabilities of web typography by increasing the number of fonts web designers can choose from. I’m pretty sure they do this with the @font-face, a bit of javascript and a subscription. Either way it has some pretty awesome capabilities.
The awesome thing about Typekit and @font-face is that they work in Safari; the shitting thing about Typekit and @font-face is that they don’t work anywhere else (at least not IE, FF, Chrome or Opera).
edit: @font-face will work in IE, FF, Chome & Opera, but additional font file types are needed and it must be in a version running CSS3. OTF & TTF work in Safari, but EOT is needed for IE, and SVG is needed for Opera.
As annoying as that may seem, TTF fonts can magically be turned into EOT here, and an SVG converter can be downloaded here.
Here’s an additional resource on the subject: Mozilla Hacks @font-face
I decided to make a little web utility so that I could more easily preview the Typekit fonts without logging in and using their previewer. Since I currently have a free membership with Typekit I’m only able to use two of their fonts at a time, so I decided to add a few free typefaces that I found. If I do end up getting a membership I think it will come in handy.