Webmonkey » Fonts

Adobe, Google Partner for Edge Web Fonts

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 18:08:37 +0000

Adobe Edge Web Fonts service. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

As part of its new Edge Suite of tools for web developers Adobe has announced Edge Web Fonts, a new free service much like Google Web Fonts.

In fact Adobe has partnered with Google to make most of Google’s open source fonts available through Edge Web Fonts as well. Both services also include the Source Sans Pro open source font family Adobe released earlier this year and the brand-new Source Code Pro.

The full list of fonts available through the service can be found on Adobe’s new Edge Fonts site, though sadly there’s no way to preview them. Previews of what Adobe’s Typekit blog calls the “more popular” options can be found on the Edge Web Fonts page.

Adobe also plans to work with Google to improve many of the fonts, adding hinting for better rendering at smaller sizes and optimizing other aspects for better-looking, better-performing fonts. The company plans to open source its improvements so even if you prefer to stick with Google Web Fonts you’ll still eventually have access to better looking fonts.

So why go with Adobe’s new Edge Fonts over Google’s existing service? There’s really no advantage if you’re already happy with Google’s offering, especially if you’re downloading Google’s fonts and serving them yourself, since that eliminates the chance that Adobe’s (or Google’s) servers will go down and take your fonts with them. Of course Edge Fonts is powered by Typekit, which has proved itself reliable over the years.

For more info on Adobe Edge Web Fonts head on over to the Typekit Blog, or check out the sample code to take them for a spin on your site today.

[Update: Developer Tony Stuck has put together a very nice preview page of the Adobe Edge Fonts for those that would like to actually see the fonts before diving in, which, presumably, is everyone.]

Source Sans Pro: Adobe’s First Open Source Type Family

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:53:05 +0000

Image: Adobe

Adobe has released a new open source font family by the name of Source Sans Pro.

You can check out and download the various font weights and styles in both OTF and TTF formats from Adobe. There’s a PDF glyph sample available as well. Both Adobe Typekit and Google Web Fonts are serving up hosted copies, if you’d like an easy way to use Source Sans Pro on your website.

Source Sans Pro makes a nice headline font on the web, with a nod to classic News Gothic headline fonts of the early 20th century.

Adobe typeface designer Paul D. Hunt created Source Sans Pro. “I was drawn to the forms of the American Type Founders’ gothics designed by Morris Fuller Benton…. I have always been impressed by the forms of his News Gothic and Franklin Gothic,” writes Hunt on the Adobe Type Blog. The goal behind Source Sans Pro was to create a font that’s “both legible in short UI labels, as well as being comfortable to read in longer passages of text on screen and in print.”

Adobe’s plan is to use the new font in its open source applications, and indeed Source Sans Pro is already part of the WebKit-based code editor, Brackets. An earlier incarnation was used in the Strobe Media Playback framework. (in Strobe, Source Sans Pro is known as Playback Sans).

In addition to the font itself, Adobe is releasing the underlying source materials so that anyone who’d like to can modify Source Sans Pro to suit their whims. Source Sans Pro is available under the OSI-approved SIL Open Font License.

Decoding Web Fonts With ‘What Font’

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 13:44:27 +0000

What Font shows you which font a webpage is using

Designers have been bemoaning the state of typography in the browser since the dawn of the web. However, CSS 3 and the @font-face rule go a long way toward improving your font options. Throw in tools like lettering.js and easy-to-use font services like TypeKit and it’s not hard to turn your site into something from a typography nerd’s fantasies.

The days of only six font choices on the web are, thankfully, well behind us. Now you can choose from hundreds of fonts, whether you embed your own or use a service like Typekit. We see gorgeous typography on different sites everyday and sometimes we’re left wondering, what is that cool font?

That’s why we’re loving the What Font bookmarklet from developer Chengyin Liu. What Font is a little JavaScript bookmarklet you can add to your favorite browser and then, when you want to know which font a site is using, just click the bookmark and hover the text in question. What Font will hover a small transparent overlay with the typeface name (see screenshot above).

To try it out, head on over to Liu’s site and drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks bar.

It’s worth noting that you can get the same information from Firebug or the WebKit Inspector, but What Font doesn’t have the interface overhead of Firebug or WebKit’s developer tools — it just does one thing and does it well. Couple the What Font bookmarklet with FontFonter and you can preview your website in your favorite new font in no time.

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Good Web Typography Is Easy With Type-a-File

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:34:51 +0000

The web is awash with CSS frameworks. But, while frameworks can be great for prototyping and quick mockups, they’re often overkill for most projects. It’s also pretty rare to find a framework that meets all of your design needs.

If you’re just looking for a way to get some great typography on your site, but don’t need a grid or other tools that often come with a full-blown framework, check out Type-a-File. Type-a-File isn’t exactly a framework, it’s more specific — a set of typography styles that you can adapt into your CSS.

Type-a-File is the work of designer Russ Maschmeyer and currently offers eight different typographic style sheets, designed, in Type-a-File’s words, to “give your web typography a head start.”

The style sheets takes advantage of some of the new features in CSS 3 like column-count and border-radius, as well as services like TypeKit for fancy fonts. Fortunately, the vast majority of the rules aren’t based on the still-nascent CSS 3 spec, so nearly all the effects will work in older browsers as well.

In addition to basic rules for typographic elements — h1-6, p, lists, cite and so on — Type-a-File has a few classes you can apply to pull quotes, create “kickers” or “sidenotes” and change default headings.

Type-a-File is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so if you’d like to take one of the eight example style sheets and use it to build something of your own you’re feel to do so. You can even submit it back to Type-a-File for inclusion on the site.

Photo by the four elements/Flickr/CC

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Adobe Shows Off Fancy WebKit-Based Typography

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:58:26 +0000

Typography on the web has improved by leaps and bounds since the dark days of the blink tag, but it’s still a long way from ideal.

Sure there are great ways to serve custom fonts, and you can even use JavaScript libraries like Lettering.js for even more control over your layout. But when it comes to the flow of text around images, pull quotes and other block level elements, well, web typography falls apart.

The demo movie above from Adobe shows off some WebKit-based experiments that seek to change that. Adobe Engineering VP Paul Gubbay narrates and the demo, and he shows how his team is extending the WebKit browser to do some new typographic tricks. WebKit is the open source engine behind Safari and Google Chrome, and it powers the most popular mobile browsers like the ones on the iPhone, iPad, iPod and all the Android phones. The demo certainly shows some impressive results.

However, we’re a bit suspicious of the methodology behind the results. Gubbay talks about extending WebKit’s CSS support via vendor prefixes, but neglects to mention what those prefixes are built against — in other words, there’s no mention of submitting a standard that other browsers could work from.

In fact, while the demo is pretty cool, the whole overview is too vague to say much about other than, “that would be nice.”

Also, note to Adobe, you don’t need to work with Google to work on WebKit. It’s an open source project. You can just submit your patches (instructions are here).

[via John Nack]

Update: The original post got Paul Gubbay’s name wrong. We have updated it. (Sorry, Paul!) Also, be sure to read his response in the comments.

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Lettering.js Makes Complex Typography Easy

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:44:29 +0000

CSS 3 adds some awesome new tools to web designers’ toolkit — the ability to rotate, transform and tweak elements means complex layouts can be done with nothing more than some style sheet rules.

Combine that with some of the fancy new fonts available through web services like Typekit and Fonts.com and you’re well on your way to replicating the kind of fine-tuned typography control print designers have long enjoyed. However, targeting individual letters and words can still be tricky.

That’s where Lettering.js comes in. The JQuery plugin can wrap your text with span tags, allowing you to target CSS rules to individual letters, words or sentences.

If you wondered how the designers behind the Lost World’s Fairs CSS experiment did it, well, look no further than Lettering.js. The other showcase examples on the Lettering.js website are no less impressive.

The library, which requires JQuery, can be downloaded from Github. Using it is as simple as selecting the element you want to target and applying the appropriate function — basically, whether to wrap the letters, words or lines of your target element.

One thing to note, the developers recommend putting Lettering.js in your head tags to avoid the unsightly flash of unstyled content that can occur if you include it at the bottom of your page.

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A Design Contest for Web Fonts

Michael Calore — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:23:22 +0000

The Web Font Awards are coming soon. It’s a new competition recognizing the most beautiful applications of web fonts in site design and technological achievements in type on the web. There’s no entry deadline or submission guidelines yet, but the contest will involve an actual meatspace awards ceremony and real cash prizes.

From the Web Font Awards site:

The Web Font Awards – the first ceremony to celebrate the newfound typographic freedom empowering Web designers across the globe. The Web Font Awards will be a design competition for websites using Web fonts. Aimed at promoting Web font awareness and adoption, the competition will be open to eligible users of any Web font service or technology.

Sign up at the site to be notified of dates, deadlines, rules and requirements as soon as they are available. Though we’re guessing this site (possibly NSFW) already has the top prize in the bag.

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Web Heavies Send a Love Letter to Open Web Fonts

Michael Calore — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:29:07 +0000

The nascent Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is getting a boost this week thanks to some new initiatives being kicked off by the W3C, the web’s governing body.

The W3C recently created a working group to build a WOFF into a web standard, and that group will be holding its first face-to-face meeting at the TypeCon 2010 conference taking place this week in Los Angeles.

Representatives from the major browser vendors, several font foundries and web services providers will be in attendance. Also, a dozen or so select individuals will be participating in a series of presentations and panel discussions about WOFF throughout the conference. All the design industry folks in attendance will get a peek at the future of high-quality typography on the web. There are scores of topics on the program, but this year, WOFF is getting top billing.

Things are looking up for web fonts in general. Monday, Typekit announced a partnership with Adobe to include the company’s fonts as part of its licensing service. Last month, Google launched a new tool (tied to its Font API) that makes it dead easy to include any of its open source fonts in website designs.

The Web Fonts working group was formed earlier this year at the W3C, and the group has already released the first working draft of the specification that will eventually lead to WOFF becoming a recommended web standard.

WOFF works just like OpenType and TrueType — you use the @font-face CSS property to drop the fonts in — but the font data is compressed, so the files download faster, and you can include more fonts in your designs without worrying as much about payload bloat.

The W3C adds this bit: “The WOFF format is not expected to replace other formats such as TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format or SVG fonts, but provides an alternative solution for use cases where these formats may be less performant, or where licensing considerations make their use less acceptable.”

Support for WOFF is already strong — Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Microsoft browsers either ship with or are building support, and the fast-moving foundries are releasing WOFF fonts — so why is the W3C’s involvement a big deal when the open source format is enjoying such success?

Standardization by the W3C is the best path to true interoperability. It will keep all the parties on the same page when it comes to things like accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, internationalization and search engine indexing. How much metadata to include and how it is handled are also big issues. Plus, fonts have taken an astonishingly long time to arrive on the web because of red tape around licensing, and a collaborative process for developing licensing infrastructures will go a long way toward convincing some of the more conservative type designers to make web-friendly versions of their creations.

The standard will take years to complete (the process is very slow — we’re guessing 2012 or so), and until then, we’ll see designers, developers and innovative service providers like Typekit and Google continue to feed the interest in fancy web fonts. Those not on the bleeding edge may be stuck in the boring world of “web safe” fonts for a while, but at least the future is bright.

TypeCon 2010 runs from August 17 through 20.

Photo by Leo Reynolds/Flickr/CC

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Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

Michael Calore — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:13:22 +0000

Google launched a new web-based tool Wednesday that helps you configure, test and easily embed one of the company’s free fonts into your web pages.

The Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons. Once you have the type the way you like it, just copy the provided code and paste it into the CSS.

It’s so ridiculously easy, even I was able to use it to change the h1 style on my personal site in about 2 minutes. I chose Pablo Impallari’s Lobster.

Google first took the web font plunge back in May by releasing the Google Font API and publishing a collection of free, open source fonts anyone can use in their designs for free. It also joined up with Typekit (who released an API today) to put together a JavaScript library for designers to control how and when their fonts are loaded.

The fonts in the Font Previewer are the same ones available through the Google Font API. They are quite nice, with a range of script, serif, sans-serif and monospace typefaces. The various typefaces used on the Android devices (Droid), and the old-timey one from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 site (IM Fell) are part of the package.

Here’s Google’s announcement with some more info.

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Typekit Gets an API

Michael Calore — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:54:27 +0000

Font startup Typekit introduced an API Thursday that lets web programmers generate kits from the Typekit library behind the scenes.

The company has previously only offered the option of picking fonts and generating kits using the web-based tool on its site. But by releasing an API, it’s giving people the option of building Typekit into their own apps or simply extending the way they use the service.

Writing on the Typekit blog, Paul Hammond says: “The Typekit API gives you the ability to programmatically create, modify and publish kits. It also allows them to fetch metadata about all the fonts in the Typekit library.”

Here are the documentation pages. As you can see, the Typekit API returns data in a few different flavors (JSON, XML and YAML)

There’s an example page set up on Github, and while there isn’t much there yet (just a kit generator for Ruby) we can expect more soon.

If you haven’t yet explored Typekit’s service for including fancy fonts in your site designs, you should. Especially handy is the WebFont Loader, an open source library of scripts that Typekit developed to help eliminate the “flash of unstyled text” that happens when a page loads. The WebFont Loader offers a number of JavaScript events which allow developers more control over when and how their fonts are loaded onto the page.

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