Where I talk about Typekit
by Arik
If you have ever cared about designing a website, typography has always been an itch rarely scratched considering the support provided both legacy and modern browsers. But that is all changing right in front our eyes with such tools as Typekit and Kernest. Today I will talk about Typekit and why it’s not quite the tool it needs to be.
I need those fonts in Photoshop
Since most web designers design first in photoshop or [your favorite design app here], Typekit does not do much good. Unless I can actually download those fonts for use in my pre-browser workflow, how can it possibly make sense to use typekit for a real project? Sure I can change my workflow to sketch designs and then go straight to the browser, but sometimes you just want to see how two fonts work together and that is difficult with Typekit.
If typekit offered some sort of 30-day “design time” trial on font downloads, that would be most awesome. I’d even pay a fee for it. It would give me enough time to test the fonts before I go to “production” or the browser.
Other than that
Typekit is great. It is exactly how I expected this kind of solution to look and work. The font rendering is very consistent across browsers and darn near instant and the implementation is simple and portable. What more do you want? Font selection? Oh yeah, they have that too!
The font selection is awesome. But after riding the coat tails of Arial, Georgia and Tahoma for the past 10 years, I can’t say that it’s easy to get use to expanded horizon of typography options. I found myself looking for fonts that resemble what I’ve been using in the past. But that changes after a few tweaks to the imagination.
What I’d like see
Like I said, I’d love to see more respect for pre-browser workflows (aka photoshop, fireworks, what have you). Another thing I’d like see is faster font rendering. I know, I know. It’s blazing fast for a first run, but dude, sometimes it’s not that fast and almost comparable to sIFR (Yeah, I just went there).