Typotheque offer web licenses

Good news everybody!

The Typotheque font foundry are now offering web licenses with a hosted service similar to Typekit (read my review on Typekit.)

“The Typotheque Web Font Service enables you to use custom fonts in your website using the @font-face rule in CSS. Just add a line of code to your page and get it working in minutes. Simple, fast and standard-compliant.”

How does it differ from Typekit?

The main difference I see is that the font isn’t provided through JavaScript embedding. Rather a version of the font is hosted for you, as well as a specific CSS file that you link in your HTML document. This would suggest the original font file would be a lot easier to obtain (if you were inclined to do such a thing.)

“since about 95% of the font information is removed, even if the file is pirated, it only contains 5% of the font”

Another difference to note is that unlike Typekit this is not a subscription service. You are paying a one-off license fee. You are also paying a monthly bandwidth fee. They do however provide the initial 500mb per-month for free, and then charge €1 per gigabyte after that. So not too shabby for a 20kb file. They host on Amazon’s cloud service which is safe to assume fairly reliable.

Why is this good news?

Well at the moment the whole web-font-license issue is cloudier than an English autumn. It’s great to see the Typotheque foundry leading the charge for clarity by making a stance with what they offer - and on the face of it, it looks like a very fair and value-for-money service. They don’t limit on usage across multiple domains either.

Let’s hope more foundries follow suit.