A Proposal to Create the YouTube of Typefaces
Typography was my first design love.
A well chosen typeface, used effectively, is like a the score of a movie. Adding richness and tone to the underlying story.
Unfortunately, here in web browser land we’ve only got a few good notes; Helvetica (1957), Verdana (1996), Georgia (1993),
Online typography doesn’t exist today. Full stop.
If we assume browser-based publishing will be the primary form of graphic design moving forward and the easiest form to-be-typographers will cut their teeth on, we have effectively reduced their piano to 3 keys. All of which are older than modern browsers.
Today, WebKit supports downloadable custom fonts. Netscape 4.0, IE 4.0 also did a decade ago.
Yet for 10 years, we’ve had the same browser typeface choices.
The same 3 notes over and over and over and over.
No wonder when Stefan Hartwig asked me what my favorite typefaces were, I was stumped for a minute. For my entire professional career, I’ve had the same choices.
Yes, this is an extension of a post I wrote 18 months ago:
Typeface Licensing, For Those Who Think Music Licensing is Easy.
My proposal is the opposite of Andrei Michael Herasimchuk’s plea to Adobe.
I want a YouTube of typefaces. Easily created, open to everyone to easily embed-able.
We already have the CSS code to use the custom typefaces:
John Gruber retorts:
Visit MySpace lately? Quality is mostly irrelevant.
Things we need for this to happen:
1. Free and easy to use typeface creation tools
2. Typefaces with licensed for this use (CC, public domain, lots of choices here)
3. Typefaces to be embedded in webpages
Without it, typography might as well be added to obsoleteskills.com, and type foundaries will only have themselves to blame for their lack of a market.
Thanks to @stefanhartwig and @arikjones for inspiring this post.
UPDATE April 03, 2008.
German type foundary FDI fonts.info releases Graublau Sans Web free for web embedding. Progress.
6 Comments
An excellent topic. I couldn’t agree more that we need many, many more options for Web typography… but I think the primary issue is the lack of high-quality typefaces that are openly available, more so than access to the tools and distribution channel.
I think the only real solution is for a few enlightened type designers to create a range of new type choices and then offer them for free to anyone who wants them. It is the same basic idea behind open source software. Hell, I suspect you could take up a collection and hire someone to create them. Even a handful would greatly expand the options currently available.
I haven’t really experimented with font embedding technologies or techniques for some time (aside from the rather dodgy sIFR). But assuming the CSS code you’re describing is or becomes reliably cross-browser, that should be all you need. You don’t need a centralized location from which to serve typefaces, since they’re small (unlike video); you just need permission. And a YouTube-like centralized server wouldn’t solve the licensing issue, since it wouldn’t be difficult to grab the fonts once they were downloaded (which has been the stumbling block all along).
The other aspect of what you’re describing, making it free and easy to create your own typefaces, doesn’t strike me as a serious need — the Internet is replete with crappy, amateur-designed typefaces, many of which are free to use. Faced with making the rest of the Web look, to use your example, like MySpace, I’d rather just stick with Arial, Helvetica, Times and Georgia.
I feel that the two fundamental holes in what you want is (1) the fact that a browser with <5% market share is the only one that currently supports this and (2) creating a font is much more work than just point, click, upload (like YouTube).
1: Sure, this ability is in the CSS spec and it’s there to stay, but the question is, “WHEN will other browsers support it, most notably Internet Explorer?”
2: I feel that the quality of the fonts will be of the caliber of YouTube comments… each one you see reduces your IQ.
Paul, thanks for the great comment.
Do you know of an open-source or otherwise low-cost typeface creation too?
Also, I’m of the belief that without a gazillion ugly typefaces being embedded, we’ll never get the good ones. Ever. We haven’t had either yet.
Yes. I really had not thought about this. We should have more choices. There is no reason not to. Thanks for surfacing the idea again, you’ve convinced me to be an advocate!
@Paul Armstrong,
First, as I mentioned, IE has supported its own method for font embedding since v4.0. If browser support was the issue, we would have seen this long ago.
Second, one day, not to long ago, watching, and sharing video online was more difficult.
Third, why are you reading the YouTube comments?
Lots of discussion on this topic (font embedding) as well as the issue of varied licensing over at typophile.com:
http://www.typophile.com/node/37793
(beware the uglified April 1 version up today…I’m turning into a curmudgeon…April 1 web sites are getting annoying…)
There’s several issues, as noted:
– commercial typeface developer’s concerns re: IP
– browser support
– end-user control
As a graphic designer who loves typography and the web, I’m actually not that hot on this idea.
There are more scrapbooking moms on the internet than trained type setters. My fear is MySpace and Facebook creep. ;o)
As for free type creation software, realize that that is a very niche market, so we’re probably not going to see a lot of competition out there. And to make an OT typeface of any quality (ie, kerning pairs, alternative characters, etc.) ain’t easy.
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/