On September 24 of last year we announced that we’d completed a partnership with Monotype, long in the works, that would allow us to offer more than 1,000 of their most popular web fonts via Typekit.

At the time we said that these fonts would be “coming soon” to Typekit. Clearly, we have fallen short on that promise. We’d like to explain what’s going on with this product and why there’s been such a delay.

It’s a big subject, so we’re splitting it into two posts. Today we’ll share what we can about the Monotype update, with the goal of enabling you to make the best decision about when and how to use Typekit going forward. In a forthcoming post, we’ll provide more detail on how fonts are added to the Typekit library, in terms of licensing, font processing, ensuring browser support, and more.

Our progress

At the moment, we expect that we’ll be ready to make the Monotype library available to you by summer of 2013. We realize this is a pretty broad timeframe, but unfortunately that’s as precise as we can be right now.

Making the Monotype library available through Typekit is a complicated project. Coming to a licensing agreement with Monotype was a big part of that work, and our excitement in that accomplishment is what led us to make our pre-announcement.

The balance of the work involves preparing the fonts using Typekit’s web font processing engine, and making them easy to find and use in the Typekit library. This turned out to be an even bigger job than we anticipated. Even though it’s well underway, it continues to share resources with other big projects that are also extremely important to our customers. Monotype has been a patient partner as we work to resolve these issues.

Another issue is structuring the plans and pricing for this new offering. We mentioned in our announcement that Monotype fonts will be offered as an upgrade. While some people interpreted this to mean that Monotype fonts would be included with their existing subscription, we want to clarify that this isn’t the case. There will be a separate charge in addition to your Typekit or Creative Cloud subscription.

This arrangement is the first of its kind for us, so it also requires significant changes to the architecture of our billing and payment systems, which comes with some engineering complexity that we didn’t fully appreciate when we made our announcement.

We’re sorry

In comments on the blog, on Twitter, and in your emails to us, many of you have let us know that you’re frustrated and disappointed by this delay, and we want you to know that we’re sorry we let you down.

We announced our partnership with Monotype too soon—we should have waited until we were ready to commit to a delivery date. By saying that it was “coming soon,” we realize some of you may have made plans to use Monotype fonts via Typekit in your upcoming projects, and we didn’t mean to steer you wrong.

Also, while our announcement said that the Monotype fonts would be made available as “an upgrade to any Typekit plan,” we’re concerned that we may have left you to assume it would be included in your current Typekit or Creative Cloud subscription, instead of an additional subscription at an added cost.

We especially regret waiting too long to share more information with you. To that end, for any customers who chose to buy a Typekit account based on our pre-announcement, we’d like to offer your money back. If you bought a Typekit account since the date of our announcement (September 24, 2012) through today, and you choose to cancel your account any time in the next 30 days, just write support@typekit.com and request a refund.

Thanks for your patience and understanding, and thank you for using Typekit.