Web Fonts: The final frontier

Tired of looking at the same 20 fonts on the web yet? I love Tahoma and Comic Sans as much as the next guy but wouldn’t it be great for designers and brands to be able to use any font they want? Sure, there are solutions using flash or graphics but we need something that maintains best web and SEO practices. With groups like Typekit, Font Squirrel, Ascender, Font Bureau, and now Google’s recent launch of their Font Directory, I think we’ll see some acceleration in bringing more fonts to the web. While these groups work with type designers and foundries on licensing models for web distribution the browser manufaturers will have to work to catch up technically. A font intended to display in print at 600dpi may not look so good at 72dpi, but hey, I remember a time when there were only 216 “web-safe” colours. Here are some examples of embedding machine text, i.e., no use of graphics, into web pages.