Type Tuesday: Typekit and a Pun
First off: how awesome is that picture? Next up: check out Typekit. Pretty rad. It apparently allows you add one line of code on your website and be able to choose from hundreds of fonts. Not sure how it works exactly, and haven’t tried it out myself. If you give it a shot and want to navigate back here and leave your experiment in the comments, please feel free to do so.
My CD has a free account that he got to play with and wasn’t quite impressed enough to pay for it. It looks like a user friendly little app, but this is what we use when we need HTML generated headers and such:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/
It’s (obviously) not as slick as the Typekit setup but its free, uses your own fonts, and is run on your own server with your own bandwidth. The only thing (aside from the UI) that I like better about Typekit is the fact that it’s still selectable text, that’s a nice feature for sure. It’s no difference on the SEO side but just for copy+paste purposes its nice.
The functionality of Typekit that allows you to create text because the font is a hosted file that the viewer’s computer uses to generate the text, is something anyone can do. However, in the About section it explains why Typekit can do what it does, legally. This is because of the relationship Typekit has with its foundry partners that allows use of their fonts, on secure servers. Normally if you host the font file, anyone can grab it and you can get in a lot of trouble (same as hosting any available copyrighted materials). sIFR doesn’t work the same way so it avoids this legal issue, but it’s also not selectable type.
Basically, if you just want something easy to make your personal blog a little cooler that you don’t mind paying for and don’t want to worry about more than an additional line of code, go for Typekit for sure. Otherwise there’s more functional alternatives available.