I have been reading about Typekit for a long time and have been eagerly waiting for them to launch. Having seen the volume of tweets this week mentioning Typekit it is safe to say they are live at last.

The age old issue for websites was the limited number of fonts available for use on the web. This has always made print designers cringe, “So you can only choose from Arial, Verdana or Time New Roman” they exclaim. Explaining this to clients as well is time consuming and they show the same amazement as the print designers.

At the moment you can choose any font you want for you website BUT if the person viewing your website does not have that font installed on their computer then the text will display in a more basic font. This has led to a trend of most websites adopting only the most basic of fonts that are pre-installed on most modern computers.

There are some solutions to this problem (sIFR comes to mind – but relies on Flash) but most have a lot of downside. So what is Typekit and what is all the fuss about?

Typekit is a very easy way to use a huge selection of fonts on your website without the need for the user to have the font installed. That means that you can be sure that the font you choose will display exactly as you planned for your users (assuming they have JavaScript enabled, but most people do these days). Add a line of code to your pages and choose from hundreds of fonts. Simple, bulletproof, standards compliant, accessible, and totally legal.

Typekit is a subscription based service (you can see pricing here) but the pricing is very reasonable and well worth the fee to enable a richer typography design on your site. Typekit work with a number of font foundries and are planning to add to the number of fonts in the future.

I will definitely be using this on the next project I work on.