The Typekit Blog

Every font in the Adobe Type catalog on Typekit has now been updated so that its vertical metrics are consistent across browsers. For designers, this means that page layouts will match more closely on all platforms. Just republish your kits to receive the updated files.

Trajan Pro 3 before and after having its vertical metrics updated

In addition, every weight and style of each family has the same vertical metrics values, so that (for instance) emboldening or italicizing a phrase in a paragraph won’t interfere with line spacing. And finally, the fonts also circumvent an unusual spacing problem in IE9 related to Typo metrics (one of three sets of vertical metrics in a font file, each of which regulates glyph clipping and line spacing in different ways on different platforms). After talking with customers about this issue, we found a reliable fix; if you wrote to our support team about IE9 spacing, thanks!

To mark two years of the sites we like column, here are some of our favorite sites from the past year.

Offscreen Magazine is as lovely on the screen as, well, off. Featuring Calluna and Bebas Neue.

Soleil and FF Meta Serif team up on the ever entertaining Art of the Title.

Impress a Penguin shows off Robert Slimbach’s oft-overlooked Warnock.

A fascinating essay on the design of a typeface for wayfinding pairs the rounded FF Netto with the soft slabs of FF Tisa.

The XOXO Festival combines Atrament italic with all-caps JAF Facit.

From the Heads of State, the wonderfully retro Pilot & Captain makes excellent use of Brandon Grotesque.

Mule Design’s Evening Edition delivers commute-sized news with Prenton Condensed and the always classic FF Meta Serif.

Type Connection pairs FF Tisa (and its companion small caps) in a playful typographic dating game.

Michael James Milton puts the blocky slab serif Kulturista to work.

And last but not least, The Shape of Design stars the bookish FF Quadraat, available from FontShop.

Have a favorite we missed? Share it in the comments!

One year ago today, we announced that Typekit would be joining Adobe. It was a thrilling day for us, both for the acknowledgement it represented and the potential we could see.

When a startup goes through an acquisition, it can be either an exit or a boost. Sometimes, a small group of people build something really cool, hand it over to a bigger company, then take a deep breath and move on to build the next thing. Other times, merging can unlock the potential of the smaller company, and things really take off. Reflecting on the last 12 months, bringing Typekit to Adobe has been an absolutely huge boost.

We’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth, and have been rebuilding almost every one of the systems that make up Typekit. After we joined Adobe, we immediately launched a redesign of our font browsing interface to accommodate our ever-growing library of typefaces. Next, we added a way for you to tag your favorite families, making it easier for you to collect inspiration for projects and for us to understand which fonts are most popular. To make it even easier to find fonts, we collected the best of our library into topical lists and launched an all-new search engine. On the backend, we replaced our identity system for logging into your account. And while we were at it, we completely rewrote our entire font serving infrastructure, ensuring we remain the fastest hosted web font service available. So yeah, we’ve been busy!

The big news, however, is how much we’ve grown. Typekit is now in use on 1.4 million websites, and in the last month alone we served fonts on over 8 billion pageviews for our customers. Our biggest increases have come from our enterprise business, which has tripled in size since the acquisition. We don’t expect this growth to slow down at all. A year ago, only 7% of the world’s top 1,000 sites used web fonts; it’s twice that now. And while that’s great, it also shows how much fertile ground remains.

Moving into a new company is a huge change for a product, but even more so for the people who make it. We remain deeply committed to Typekit, and you’ll see some exciting new things in the coming year: integrations into more Adobe products, some amazing new partnerships, and a bunch of stuff we’re not quite ready to talk about yet. What won’t change, of course, is our passion for typography and for a better, more beautiful web.

Thanks again for all the support.

We are thrilled to be sponsoring Insites: The Book, a limited edition book featuring interviews with some of our favorite people (including two of our own: Jason Santa Maria, Typekit’s creative director; and Mandy Brown, former communications director here at Typekit).

Insites: The Book features 20 informal conversations with 21 of the web and tech industries’ leading figures, delving into their stories, big wins, and lessons learned, along with the kind of tales you never hear on a conference stage. No code snippets, no design tips; just a fascinating behind-the-scenes look into the names and brands forwarding our industry.

Now available for pre-order.

One of our goals at Typekit is to make beautiful typography accessible to more people. To that end, we love to see Typekit integrated with other services, making web fonts easy and delightful. Here are some great services which have recently added support for Typekit.

Bourbon

Bourbon is a service that makes it simple to set up a high quality mobile website for your local business. In addition to powerful tools for integrating maps, galleries, menus and other features, Bourbon includes the ability to control key aspects of your site’s design, including layout, colors, and — of course — fonts provided by Typekit.

Choose from a selection of Typekit fonts in Bourbon.

Just choose the fonts you want, and let Bourbon and Typekit take care of the rest for you behind the scenes.

SpaceCraft

SpaceCraft gives you everything you need to easily create, maintain, and host an effective small business website, including fine-grained control of your site’s fonts.

The SpaceCraft homepage highlights a number of great sites built with and hosted by the service, including the official site of Lance Armstrong, which uses SpaceCraft’s integration of Typekit to achieve an elegant design incorporating Futura PT from ParaType.

Lance Armstrong’s website incorporates Futura PT via SpaceCraft and Typekit.

Rocketspark

Rocketspark bills itself as “the website that makes websites” — and it really is that simple. With its series of web-based tools, you can create a beautiful website in minutes, choosing from a focused set of layouts, smart color palette suggestions, and fonts from Typekit.

Choose from a variety of fonts from Typekit in Rocketspark.

The Rocketspark portfolio page showcases great sites created with the service.

With all of these partner sites, you just specify your fonts, and you’re on your way. There’s no need to configure kits or work with the Typekit embed code. It’s that easy.

Do you run a platform that would benefit from a Typekit-powered web font integration like those described here? Drop us a line at support+partners@typekit.com to learn how to get started.

We recently launched some changes to our recommended embed code. An important part of those changes was making an advanced embed code that loads fonts asynchronously available from the Kit Editor. This method has been very useful for developers who want additional control and don’t mind writing some extra CSS to hide the flash of unstyled text (FOUT).

The asynchronous embed code was developed over a year ago and published both on the blog and on GitHub. Many developers put it to use right away, but officially adding it to the Kit Editor has expanded that use and resulted in additional feedback. In particular, this has helped us to uncover two issues with the original asynchronous embed code that have now been addressed:

• We fixed an issue in IE9 that caused the inactive font event to trigger briefly before the fonts loaded, causing an extra FOUT.
• We fixed an issue where whitespace between existing classnames on the <html> element could be removed unintentionally.

Both of these improvements are now reflected in the advanced embed code in the Kit Editor. To take advantage of them, simply visit the Kit Editor, click on “Embed Code” and “Show advanced,” then copy the updated embed code and paste it into your sites.

Since the embed code is the only part of a Typekit integration that can’t be updated with the push of a button, we try not to announce updates frequently. To that end, we’ve waited to announce these updates to see if any additional feedback was forthcoming. At this time, we think we’ve captured most of those concerns and an update is warranted. As always, if you have any questions, drop a line to support@typekit.com and we’ll get back to you right away.

TypeCon2012 kicks off this week in Milwaukee, and Typekit’s excited to be a part of it. Serving as a headline sponsor, we’ll be co-presenting Linotype: The Film on Friday night, along with UW Peck School of the Arts and TypeCon organizing body SOTA. If you haven’t got your ticket to TypeCon, it’s not too late: registration is still open. We’ll see you there!

At approximately 1:00 PM AEST/3:00 PM NZST on Friday, 13 July, our font network began to be unavailable for many users in Australia and New Zealand.

Our font network consists of a worldwide system of computers run by a Content Delivery Network, or CDN. Requests for fonts are routed to the nearest server to give the best performance. Unfortunately yesterday there was severe congestion on the link between two major internet service providers, Pacnet and NTT, and this in turn caused problems when trying to access our servers in Sydney. This meant fonts were unavailable for users in that region. According to our monitoring systems, this lasted approximately 2 hours and was resolved at 2:55 PM AEST/4:55 PM NZST.

Typekit font serving is back to normal. We know that our customers have high expectations for our uptime and performance, and we regret the impact this had on many of you. Going forward, we’ll be monitoring our vendor’s network performance closely and working with them to minimize any future interruptions.

The nature of the Internet means that occasional interruptions are unavoidable. For this reason, we encourage Typekit users to consider using our asynchronous loading pattern any time you need to eliminate the possibility that a problem loading the kit could interfere with loading the rest of the page. This approach ensures that your page won’t wait for the kit in the event that something goes wrong somewhere between the font network and the user.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact us at support@typekit.com.

We’re growing fast, and that means we need help. To keep pace with all the amazing things happening at Typekit, we are looking for two engineers to join our San Francisco team: a Rails engineer and an API engineer. You’ll get a chance to join a fine-tuned development organization with some of the best people working on the web today. More importantly, you’ll get to work on making life better for all of Typekit’s users.

You can apply for the roles here and here. We look forward to learning more about you.

Starting today, Typekit is rolling out a new way to browse fonts: lists. Lists have been curated by Typekit staff and feature an editorialized means of browsing. Each list features fonts organized by theme, intended use, or defining characteristic. Some of our favorite lists include a list of great rounded fonts, a list of fonts that are good for longform, and a list of condensed headline fonts.

New on Typekit: browse by list.

Lists are a great place to start when you aren’t quite sure what font you’re after. Need something casual, but aren’t sure what that means? Start with the this list of casual fonts and see where it takes you. Tired of Georgia, but don’t know what else to use? Check out this list of good Georgia alternatives. Looking for something with impact, but daunted by the number of choices? See which fat faces are our favorites.

A list of our favorite fat faces.

A list of great condensed headline fonts.

If you find a font you like, you can add it to your favorites or to a kit.

We’re starting with a small number of lists, with many more to come — take a look and let us know in the comments if there’s a list you’d love to see. Meanwhile, we’re continuing to work on a number of other projects, including improvements to search and more robust font detail pages — all of which will help you find and evaluate fonts quickly and expertly. Stay tuned!