Paying Twice? Online Versus Offline Font Support

It’s no great surprise that typography is one of the most important aspects of web design. Over the last couple of years the options for effectively displaying a wide variety of fonts in different ways have grown enormously. Yet the current options for typography in web design cause problems when it comes to the question of online versus offline font support.

Using fonts in web design

Used to be that web designers were limited to seven or eight standard fonts. These fonts were the only ones which had a relatively universal level of support across different platforms and operating systems. There weren’t many other web safe options.

Various interim options such as sIFR and Cufon provided designers with additional options, displaying a wider variety of fonts. These options had serious limitations, however. Loading times could be slow, text might be non-selectable, they could be awkward to install.

More recently, the universal adoption of @font-face has meant that theoretically designers can use any typeface on a website. All they need to do is host that font on the same server as the site,. They no longer have to rely on a visitor having the font on their own computer. CSS3 further provides greater options for altering the appearance of the fonts themselves (e.g. text-shadow). The technology is there.

The problems of licensing

While the technology is there to render any font on a website, the capacity to do so is seriously limited by the failure of font licensing to keep up with technological advancements. When a web designer uses @font-face to store a font on their server, it’s relatively easy for a technologically savvy user to be able to find…and download…that font file.

Protecting intellectual property

From a font provider’s point of view, that’s the same as illegally distributing the font. For perfectly legitimate reasons, font creators don’t want their font files to be available in this way. They want to protect their intellectual property, and therefore many commercial fonts specifically forbid using that font with @font-face.

Online font libraries as a solution

There are a couple of really good options to address the issue of font licensing. Online font libraries like Typekit or Google Web Fonts provide access to a wide range of fonts. They store these fonts in their own libraries, and allow users (either free or via a paid subscription) to access these libraries with a small piece of code. They utilize @font-face capability in a way which web designers can use both technically and legally.

The issue of wider branding

Online libraries are great. I use Typekit all the time. But for a business on a limited budget, and looking to make their website an integral part of their overall brand, there are some potential limitations.

Branding is more than just a website. It includes a wide range of physical media, too. Logos, business cards, letterheads, flyers, etc. Online font libraries don’t give any help when it comes to using those fonts outside of a web page. This isn’t an issue with free fonts provided by these libraries, but they often have limited character sets or limitations on commercial use. Commercial fonts often remain the best design option.

Except you might have to pay twice

Let’s say a company wants to use the font Atrament.

If they buy the font directly from a source like MyFonts they can use the font for physical media, but they can’t use it online (because they’d have to upload the font to their server to use @font-face and the license likely forbids this).

If they buy a portfolio subscription to Typekit they can use the font on their website, but they don’t have any capacity to use it offline.

To get the universal use of the font necessary for their online and offline branding, they have to pay for both options.

To buy all 10 weights and styles of Atrament on MyFonts is $339. A portfolio subscription on Typekit is $49.99 a year. While this might not seem like a huge amount of money, for a small or new business every penny can count. Having to pay twice in order to gain universal use of a single font is just another additional expense.

Future solutions

Even services like Typekit are still interim options. The long term solution will likely be the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). This file format allows fonts to be hosted on a server, and usable with @font-face, but in a compressed, encoded manner which resolves the licensing problems.

While WOFF is supported in the latest versions of all major browsers, Internet Explorer only started offering full support with the recent version 9. With the extensive use of earlier versions of IE likely to continue for at least a few more years, WOFF doesn’t provide sufficiently universal support.

In the meantime web designers will have to continue using imperfect methods. These methods, increasingly advanced and convenient to use as they are, still create a division between online and offline font support.

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