The Typekit Blog

Great typography is critical to great design, so great typefaces should be easily accessible everywhere they’re needed. Typekit has spent the last four years bringing type to the web, and today we’re giving you a sneak peek at the next step in our evolution: desktop fonts and web fonts together in a single subscription.

We’ll be making fonts in the Typekit library available for desktop use, starting with 175 font families from 7 top-tier foundries. You’ll be able to sync them to your desktop and use them in all your applications for web mockups, print design, word processing, and more.

Here’s Typekit’s own Ben Welch to show you how it works:

Desktop font syncing is a part of the next major update to Adobe Creative Cloud, which was just announced this morning and will launch in mid-June. (Watch the keynote here.) Desktop fonts will be included with Typekit Portfolio, Performance, and Business plans, as well as paid Creative Cloud subscriptions.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing in-depth explorations of the typefaces coming from each participating foundry partner: Adobe, exljbris, FontFont, Mark Simonson Studio, ParaType, TypeTogether, URW++, and Dalton Maag. Keep an eye on the blog!

We are pleased to announce that, starting today, Typekit is available in French. Over the last several months we’ve worked hard to translate and localize our user interface, touching on details from font browsing to account management. We’re also rolling out new homepage designs in both French and English, with the French version featuring type from Typofonderie.

If your browser or operating system’s default language is set to French, you should see the French version of Typekit automatically. If you’d like to switch languages at any time, just look for the “Change Language” links in the footer of any page, and click on the language you prefer.

In addition to localizing our user interface, we’ve added French-speaking representatives to our support department. Customers can reach these representatives via email at support+fr@typekit.com or via Twitter at @typekit_fr.

What you’ll see en français

While we’ve worked hard to build a great experience for our French users, there are some small differences between the English and French versions of Typekit that we’d like to call out.

• Lists are not yet available in French, and so have been hidden from our site navigation on the French site. French users will still be able to link directly to a list via its URL, but the text will be displayed in English.
• We’re unable to offer our full-text search feature to non-English users at this time. French users will, however, still be able to search for fonts by name.
• Finally, sample text and web font specimens are not being translated.

Vos remarques, s’il vous plaît

We’re excited to welcome French-speaking users into the Typekit community, and will continue to develop features in all supported languages as quickly as we can.

Is there anything you’d like to see next? Spot any oversights? Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your thoughts on how you’d like this site to grow! We look forward to seeing this new branch of the Typekit community take shape.

We have added a new list to Typekit: code fonts. These are perfect for code samples, live editing, and readme-style documentation. Included among the tried and true members of this list is a handsome newcomer, Adobe’s own Source Code Pro.

Source Code Pro is clean and understated, with good balance.

Code fonts are monospaced, with clearly distinguishable characters.

Lists are a great way to browse for fonts, especially if you aren’t sure what you need. Use them to generate ideas or learn more about the fonts in our library. Looking for a list we don’t have? Suggest one in the comments.

Back in January of 2010, Typekit released samples of all our fonts in every platform and on every browser we support. Today, we’re announcing an update to these browser samples which adds new browsers, a new look, and a new approach to browser updates.

The new browser sample: a larger range of font sizes, the latest browser version, and no underlines.

Browser samples are a great way to evaluate the rendering quality of a font on different platforms and browsers. As we’ve discussed in the past, there are many factors that can affect font rendering. Some fonts are designed for use at large sizes while others do well when set small. When choosing a font, it’s helpful to be able to check the rendering across the major browsers and platforms without having to publish a kit and make a test page first. Browser samples make this possible.

Since we first launched browser samples, the browser landscape has changed quite a bit. Originally, Chrome was the only browser on a rapid and automatic upgrade cycle. Today, most browsers are releasing updates frequently and automatically, and the ones that don’t yet are moving in that direction. As such, we’ve updated our collection of browsers to reflect this new reality: we are now taking screenshots in the latest released version of each browser, and we’ll be keeping the browsers up-to-date over time. This means that we’ll also be re-taking the browser samples on a regular basis, so that you’re always seeing accurate and up-to-date rendering. Screenshots will also continue to be available for older versions of IE, because they’re not automatically updated and continue to see a meaningful amount of use. If you’re curious about the precise browser version that a particular screenshot was taken in, check out the version information at the bottom.

New browser samples will always be taken in a recently released version of each browser.

We’ve also updated the look of screenshots to be more useful. We now include additional font sizes — from a tiny 10 px up to a headline-sized 72 px — so that you can more accurately assess the rendering at a size near your target. We’ve also removed the underlines from our samples, since they were distracting and not very useful.

To check out the newly updated browser samples, just visit any font detail page (like this one for the lovely Freight Sans) and click on the Browser Samples tab. Then select a variation and choose from one of the OS and browser options in the dropdown menus.

Update: Please read the Update on Monotype fonts post.

Since we started Typekit, we’ve worked hard to build a library of the world’s most important, useful, and hardworking fonts. In that time, we’ve been adding fonts weekly — yet there has been one foundry in particular with whom we’ve been eager to partner.

That’s why we’re very happy to announce that we’ve partnered with Monotype Imaging to offer some of their best fonts on Typekit.

Everywhere you go in the world today — whether you realize it or not — you see typefaces from Monotype. Soon, we’ll be adding over 1,000 of those fonts to our service, available as an upgrade to any Typekit plan. That means you’ll have access to some of the world’s most historically important fonts, including the complete families of Helvetica Neue, Avenir, Univers, ITC Garamond, Frutiger, and many more.

We will also be offering the Adobe Originals type collection via the Monotype Fonts.com web font service, with all the features and functionality they offer.

It’s a remarkable partnership, and we couldn’t be happier about it. As we get closer to launching, we’ll have more details to post here on our blog — so stay tuned.

As part of our efforts to make web fonts more broadly accessible and easy to use, we’re excited to introduce Adobe Edge Web Fonts, a new free web font service.

Edge Web Fonts features hundreds of web fonts, including a sampling of fonts from the Adobe library as well as a large collection of open source fonts. Under the hood, the service is powered by Typekit: it uses the same standards-based method of serving fonts and makes use of the same global font serving network for speed and stability. But it’s completely free and requires no account or kit configuration — making it faster and easier to get started.

Google Web Fonts and Edge Web Fonts

We’ve partnered with Google to make many of the open source fonts originally commissioned by the Google Web Fonts project available through Edge Web Fonts. At the same time, Adobe is contributing two open source fonts of its own — the recent Source Sans Pro and, announced today, Source Code Pro — to both the Adobe Edge Web Fonts and Google Web Fonts services.

In addition, Adobe will be applying its considerable font expertise to improving and optimizing a number of the open source fonts that are available in both Google Web Fonts and Edge Web Fonts. The teams from Typekit, Adobe Type, and Google Web Fonts are working to identify which fonts will benefit the most from our attention, and how we can best approach improving their rendering and performance. Efforts will include hinting some fonts for better rendering at smaller sizes, plus a number of other optimizations. All of these contributions will themselves remain open source.

We’re excited to be part of these efforts, and are glad to be once again partnering with our friends at Google to improve fonts on the web. Read more from Google here.

Available now

Starting today, you can use Edge Web Fonts in both Adobe Muse and Edge Code, a code editor based on the open source Brackets project. Next up, Edge Web Fonts will be available in the soon-to-be-released Edge Reflow, a tool for creating responsive CSS layouts and more. More integrations are upcoming with Adobe’s Edge Tools & Services.

But Edge Web Fonts isn’t limited to Edge tools — you’re free to use it with whichever tools you prefer. You can preview some of the best of the fonts here, where you’ll also find instructions on how to use them in your web projects. We’ve also made a list of all of the fonts in the Edge Web Fonts library available.

More tools for working with Edge Web Fonts are just around the corner. Stay tuned.

By popular demand, we’ve added four new lists to Typekit: geometric sans serifs, grotesque sans serifs, humanist sans serifs, and humanist serifs.

Geometric sans serifs are constructed of straight, monolinear lines and circular or square shapes.

Grotesque sans serifs have shapes and proportions that are fairly uniform, with low stroke contrast.

Humanist sans serifs are calligraphic in structure, often with higher stroke contrast than other sans serifs.

Sometimes called “Old Style,” humanist serifs are the very first kind of Roman typeface.

Lists are a great way to browse for fonts if you aren’t quite sure what you’re looking for. Use them to generate ideas or learn more about the fonts in our library.

Looking for a list we don’t have? Suggest one in the comments.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Adobe’s Creative Cloud service, a new subscription service that gives you access to all of the Adobe Creative Suite applications, plus touch apps, and services — including Typekit. What’s more, Creative Cloud includes tools for file sharing, collaboration, and publishing, and new apps and features will be available to members as soon as they are released. You can read more about Creative Cloud (and what’s in store for the future) from Typekit’s founder, Jeff Veen.

If you subscribe to Creative Cloud, you’ll receive a Typekit Portfolio plan along with your subscription. You will get all the applications that come with Creative Suite and a Typekit account with access to our full library — for just $49.99 a month. (If you’ve previously purchased Creative Suite 3 or later, your first year of Creative Cloud will cost just $29.99 a month.)

If you are a current Typekit user on the Personal, Portfolio, or Performance plans, you will be able to upgrade to a Creative Cloud subscription. When you do so, you’ll receive a prorated refund for the time remaining on your current Typekit plan. But this upgrade is optional: if you prefer, you can stick with your current Typekit plan just as it is. All of Typekit’s plans will continue to be available standalone through typekit.com.

In order to take advantage of Creative Cloud (and receive your refund, if appropriate), you must first update your Typekit account to use Adobe ID. Your Adobe ID will allow us to link your Creative Cloud subscription to your Typekit account. Read on to learn how to link your existing Typekit account to a new Creative Cloud subscription.

If you’re new to Typekit, getting started with Creative Cloud and Typekit couldn’t be easier. Learn how you can start using Typekit with your Creative Cloud subscription right away.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them here or reach out to support@typekit.com.

Typekit’s plans are structured, in part, around an allotment of monthly pageviews, which are counted in aggregate across all of the kits in your account. Until now, the system we’ve used to track pageviews on users’ sites has not accounted for browser caching. This means that we have undercounted the number of pageviews on all users’ sites. We are now making a shift to incorporate pageviews into the way we pay our foundry partners. As a result, starting today, we’re moving to a system which will help ensure more accurate pageview measurement, whether a kit remains cached or not.

This new system uses a one pixel transparent image to record every pageview; the image is loaded asynchronously and will not block page loading. This is a common pattern used by many web services, and one which we have already put to use on our CDN-integrated Enterprise plans. We are confident you won’t see any meaningful difference in the appearance or loading of your sites as a result of this change.

You may, however, notice the pageview chart on your account increase over the next few weeks. If you were close to your plan’s pageview limit before, you may find that this update puts you over that limit. That said, we will not automatically shut off any account that goes over the limit solely as a result of this change; rather, any Typekit user with an account created today or earlier will be given a three-month grace period on their pageview limits. If this update puts you over the limit of your current plan, that means you have time before you will be asked to upgrade to a higher plan.

The data that we collect from this pageview measurement will be used in two ways: to monitor whether accounts are within their plan limits and, most importantly, to compensate our foundry partners for the use of their fonts on users’ sites. Our goal has always been to provide an excellent service while also supporting the hard work that foundries and type designers do to bring their type to the web; more accurate measurement allows us to do all of these things better.

As always, if you have any questions about this, reach out to support@typekit.com and we will get back to you right away.