The Typekit Blog

Starting today, our friends over at Six Apart have made it incredibly easy to use Typekit with their TypePad blogging platform. Now, you can use fonts from our library to customize the hundreds of beautiful TypePad templates.

TypePad has always been a great choice for hosted blogs. They are pioneers in the blogging world, and offer a different plans that include support and loads of features. Once you’ve got an account, click on Settings — you’ll find Typekit integrated in the Add Ons section. If you need help getting started, we’ve written a tutorial for you.

Want to see some examples of Typekit on TypePad? Six Apart founder Mena Trott’s fantastic Sew Weekly uses fonts from Mark Simonson. Hewn and Hammered features Chunk from the League of Movable Type. And Stephen Coles told us it took him just 10 minutes to update his beautiful blog, The Mid-Century Modernist.

Got a TypePad blog? Get started here…

In response to many requests, we’re happy to announce that Jos Buivenga’s foundry exljbris Font Foundry is joining Typekit, including the very popular Museo, Museo Sans, and Museo Slab . Based in Arnhem, Jos makes his fonts free for all users and that’s what we are doing as well- all exljbris fonts are available in all Tyekit subscription levels.

In addition to the Museo family, we’re adding the robust and and elegant Anivers , the clean and contemporary Calluna, and the beautiful Fertigo Pro and Fertigo Pro Script.

Also joining Tyekit is Typefolio, an independent Brazilian type foundry established by the designer Marconi Lima. Its foundation was motivated by the desire to offer to the international market typographical projects that prioritizes the quality in technique, functionality and aesthetics.

The first font from Typefolio is Adriane, a font with unique typographic details that provide both personality and excellent legibility at small sizes.

Go have a look!

Have you tried the Readability service yet? The concept is simple: whenever you land on a web page filled with flashing ads and a cluttered design, just hit the bookmarklet and it will reformat the page into a beautifully calm and highly legible template. It works on most any site, and makes reading on the web a joy. We’ve been using it for quite a while and can’t imaging living without it. David Pogue agrees, too. In his New York Times column, Pogue praised the service, saying “It completely transforms the Web experience, turning your computer into an e-book reader. I think I’m in love.”

And now there’s even more to love. A new version of Readability just launched and now includes Typekit fonts. That means you can apply a couple of our most legible fonts to any page on the web. Here’s how the team arc90, creators of Readability, describe the new themes:

Our new Inverse style features Betatype’s wonderfully readable Apertura. In addition, we’ve created a fifth style called Athelas which features – well – Athelas, an elegant font by Typetogether. Both fonts are available through Typekit.

Our goal with Typekit is to bring beautiful typography to the web. We think Readability is another excellent way to achieve that. Try it out now!

Using real fonts on the web is turning out to be pretty amazing. You get all the benefits of HTML — searchable, accessible text that loads quickly — with visual appeal that used to required images or Flash. But you also get a whole new set of choices and browser compatibility issues to deal with.

Using Typekit smooths out a lot of the hassle that comes with embracing a brand new technology. We serve the right fonts to the right browser, and account for occasionally inconsistent implementations. But recently, a lot of people have been noticing that not all fonts are right in all situations. Some fonts are optimized for small, readable text; others have a personality that really shines when displayed large. And some fonts render differently in different browsers and on different operating systems. It all can be really confusing.

To try to alleviate some of these issues, we’ve built a new feature that we’re pretty excited about. Starting today, you can now view screenshots of every font in our library in every browser that supports @font-face. Want to see how FF Meta renders in IE 6 on Windows XP? How about Skolar in Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu? We’ve got it covered. Just navigate to any font on Typekit and click on the “Browser Samples” tab. You can click through the collection of font rendering samples and get a good sense for how that typeface will perform in various settings. And we’ll be adding more combinations in the future: Chrome is up next, and Firefox 3.6 will follow soon after.

What do you think? Is there any way we could improve the feature? Let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Earlier today, the Mozilla Foundation released version 3.6 of Firefox. While that may sound like an incremental release, it represents a significant milestone in the ongoing story of fonts on the web. This marks the first browser to support the emerging Web Open Font Format, or WOFF.

This new standard font format was debated and refined for months, and we announced our support as consensus emerged. As we said back then, a standard based on collaboration that embraces the web’s native openness is a good thing.

So that’s why we’re not just voicing support for WOFF, but building it into our service. Over the next few days, Typekit will start serving WOFF files to Firefox 3.6. If you use Typekit to serve fonts on your website, you won’t need to do anything. Your users will automatically get the right fonts for their browsers. And if the format or browser support changes in the future, your CSS and fonts will be seamlessly upgraded.

Web standards are important, but keeping up with them can be a challenge. That’s one of the reasons we think Typekit is valuable — we’ll keep you current and compliant so you can focus on being creative.

Update: We’ve extended this offer until February 15 at midnight PST. But no longer! That’s it!

Since launching Typekit in August, we’ve been offering our early users lower prices at all account levels. It’s our way of saying thank you for supporting our service as we grow and add new features.

Soon, we’ll be changing our rates and some of the details of how Typekit accounts work. Before we do that, though, we want to give you the opportunity to get these lower prices, and also to make this special offer: Sign up now for a paid plan and we’ll lock in your subscription price for the lifetime of your account.

We won’t raise your rates next year or any time after that. If you’ve already got a paid account, you’re price is locked in as well.

Got two minutes? Sign up now!

Got a blog at WordPress.com? Now you can use Typekit! We’ve just rolled out a way to easily use fonts on the world’s largest blogging platform. With Typekit and WordPress working together, customizing the look of the nearly 10 million blogs they host now takes just a few clicks.

Log into your WordPress dashboard and click on Appearance in the left-hand navbar. There, you’ll find “Typekit Fonts” with a place to add your Kit ID (available under “Embed Code” in the Typekit Editor). That’s it — you’re ready to go. You can choose fonts from our rapidly growing library to add them to any of the WordPress themes to give your blog a distinct look.

And of course, Typekit works with WordPress blogs you host yourself. That’s getting easier as well, now that the WordPress developer community has begun to release plugins for Typekit. Check out the options over at the plugin directory.

Just in time for the holidays, a new wave of fonts for you to enjoy. We have two new foundries and more fonts from our current foundry partners. Have a look:

For the last fifteen years, Jean Francois Porchez has been designing custom fonts for a remarkable array of clients: Le Monde and Beyonce Knowles, Louis Vuitton and Peugeot. And starting today, Porchez Typofonderie fonts are available to Typekit subscribers. New fonts include the Le Monde family, (originally designed for the French newspaper), Ambroise ( an interpretation of Didot’s late style), and award-winning Apolline.

Since the early days of Typekit, local type designer Delve Withrington has been a great resource to the Typekit team . So, it is with great excitement that we start adding Delve Fonts to the Typekit library. Delve has designed type at FontShop and Monotype Imaging and also provides custom type for mobile devices and international language fonts. Delve has included the quirky Delve Hand and the artful Cody Web, among others.

Our friends at TypeTogether have added Athelas, a design that recalls the beauty of fine book printing, inspired in Britain’s literary classics. Athelas was part of the Tipos Latinos exhibition 2006, and was selected as winner of the Granshan competition 2008 in the text type category.

To round out today’s offering, Sacramento-based Steve Mehallo has added Jeanne Moderno, Jeanne Moderno Ultra and Jeanne Moderno Titling to make it a complete family. He’s also added new weights to Chandler 42, completing the family. And finally he has brought Escoffier Capitaux to Typekit, as well.

Yesterday, the Harvard Business Review launched a redesign of both their magazine and web site. Using the elegant sans serif National from Village type co-op, the venerable publication is not only updating its look, but its approach to content as well. Gone is the list of articles on the magazine’s front cover, replaced with more contemporary photography and design. A faster editorial cycle, with more connections into the website’s blogs and community, aims at keeping the print version up to date.

But here’s what we’re really excited about — when the project started, one if the key goals was to connect the magazine and website visually. They found a look that suited their brand, then found a way to make that work on the web. Furniture giant Ikea tried (some would say unsuccessfully) to unify their their brand by bringing the web’s Verdana to their printed catalogs. Thanks to advances in browser support of @font-face, HBR didn’t need to compromise.

You can read more about the redesign efforts on the HBR blog, and at Adaptive Path’s web site, the agency behind the website changes.

Have you redesigned using Typekit? Let us know!

Following the addition of four new foundries to Typekit last week, we have a wave of new fonts and specially hinted fonts from foundry partners like Mark Simonson, Underware, Paragraph, Insigne Design, and Buro Destruct.

First, Mark Simonson is adding Changeling Neo Inline and Changeling Neo Stencil to the library, making for a complete Changeling Neo family.

Next, Underware, the fine folks who make Bello Pro, have added Bello Caps to Typekit – a great compliment to their very popular brush typeface.

Jeremy Dooley of Insigne Design in Knoxville has focused specifically on web fonts. Not only is he adding a number of new faces like Chennai Slab, Sovba, and Aviano, but he has updated the hinting on existing fonts like Aviano Sans and Aviano Didone, Le Harve and Le Harve Rounded, Sommet Rounded, Olidia, and Pauline.

Similarly, Jan Schmoeger of the Australia-based Paragraph has re-hinted their contemporary sans-serif Galette. Working to optimize all six weights and styles for use on the web, the additional attention to detail is obvious in the improved rendering.

And finally, Buro Destruct from Bern, Switzerland has added BD Retrocentric, BD Viewmaster, BDR A3MIK, and BDR Mono for your typographic enjoyment. And check out the great use of BD Jupiter on the Buro Destruct blog.

Go have a look.