Adobe Returns to its Typographic Roots
Decades ago, Adobe was a champion of the use of professional-quality digital fonts, not only by creating its own library but by playing a key role in the development of font formats and fully supporting OpenType within its Creative Suite applications. That initiative had been put on the back burner in recent years, so it was good to see that with its purchase of the Typekit web fonts service last year it was back in the game. Typekit has been a significant part of Creative Cloud subscriptions since Adobe launched its membership-based service in May. This week the Typekit offering received a major upgrade as part of Adobe's rollout of its Edge Tools and Services. The clip above is an extract covering just the typographic announcements.
If you're not familiar with Typekit, the thing to know is that it's a provider of web fonts, launched way back in 2008, and while part of Creative Cloud, it remains accessible to non-subscribers. It's noted for offering fonts from respected foundries and designers and this week announced the addition of more than 1,000 fonts from Monotype, which will be "available as an upgrade to any Typekit plan." So that's good news about the fonts but the cost is unclear at this point. It's also not clear whether some or all of these fonts will be available to those using Typekit as part of their Creative Cloud subscription.
Typekit has always made available a free level of web font service but this required the creation of an account and a certain degree of technical fiddling to get things working. Part of the Adobe announcement was the launch of a new free service called Adobe Edge Web Fonts. This collection of 500 font families is made up from a selection from the familiar Google Web Fonts library, along with some additions, such as Adobe's open source Source Sans Pro and Source Code Pro. The latter, shown below, was part of the Edge announcement and looks to be a great choice for those needing a legible font when coding.
The announcement also indicated that Adobe will be working with Google to improve the quality of the fonts in both libraries, in such areas as hinting and performance. That's great but by now you may be asking yourself why you'd want to use Edge Web Fonts, rather than Google's collection. First up, the Edge Web Fonts are already integrated into Adobe Muse and Edge Code, with Edge Reflow soon to follow. So if you use any of the new Edge tools, the choice is simple enough. If not, there is some attraction to the idea of using the Typekit-hosted Edge Web Fonts, since Typekit has been doing this a long time, while hosting web fonts isn't really a priority for Google. Finally, the Edge fonts are very easy to implement— just add a line of JavaScript to your site and then use the font's font-family name in your CSS. So if you haven't yet given web fonts a try, this looks like a great place to get your feet wet.
It's good to see Adobe really pushing for widespread adoption of quality web fonts, in much the same way the firm once championed professional-grade digital fonts for print production. Let's hope they keep up the momentum until Arial, Verdana and all the rest of the banal default fonts currently used for displaying type on web pages are just a distant memory.
Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com
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