Why Can't You Use The Fonts I Want?

Often a client we are design­ing a web­site for wants a par­tic­u­lar font and we can­not use it. There are a num­ber of rea­sons why we may not.

1. The font is not licensed for web use.
2. Its a font that many peo­ple don’t have on their com­puter
3. We feel it is ill suited from a design point of view, for pro­ject­ing the pro­fes­sional image required for their suc­cess­fully mar­ket­ing their site.

Rea­son one is often a shock to peo­ple who assume any font they have on their com­puter is free to use for what­ever they want. Not nec­es­sar­ily so.

Rea­son three is based on our expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge of what works but in the end, we defer to a clients wishes. It is, after all, their site.

Rea­son two is the one we most often encounter and the hard­est to explain. The fonts we have on our com­puter are dif­fer­ent depend­ing on whether we are on a PC, Mac or Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem. Also they can dif­fer depend­ing on which soft­ware we have. For exam­ple, after we upgraded our ver­sion of Microsoft Word, we found we had a bunch of cool new fonts installed.

For a per­son to see a font used on a web page, it has to be installed on their com­puter or it is replaced by a generic com­puter font or the same type, Serif, Sans-Serif, etc. So if we use it on a web page, you will see the page fine, another vis­i­tor may not.

What a pain!

This font issue became a thorn in the side of web design­ers wish­ing to be more cre­ative on their pages as well a please clients, so workarounds were used. One such workaround is instead of text for a head­line, a graphic depic­tion of the text was used instead. There are down­sides to this, the biggest being the extra expense of cre­at­ing a graphic. Another workaround was to try and force vis­i­tors to down­load the font when they visit the site. This has down­sides as well, such as dis­con­cert­ing peo­ple with a down­load prompt when they arrive and degraded site per­for­mance. Intel­lec­tual prop­erty /licensing vio­la­tions was another poten­tial prob­lem with this workaround.

Over the years was very lit­tle progress in find­ing a solu­tion that sat­is­fied font design­ers, who deserve recog­ni­tion for their cre­ations and that worked with­out impact­ing the web­site user expe­ri­ence or load time in some man­ner. So we have been stuck with the same old safe fonts. The tried and true like Arial, Ver­dana, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Geneva and Geor­gia. There have been addi­tions to the ‘safe to use’ list of fonts but no good solu­tions to the prob­lem itself.

Things are finally improving…

Over the past few years, hosted font ser­vices have emerged and are pro­vid­ing a much needed dash of flair to the web by over­com­ing the issues I have out­lined here. Depend­ing on the ser­vice, you need to reg­is­ter and pay a fee but most have a lim­ited free level or some fonts that have no licens­ing fee. Here is a list of few of these services:

http://www.typekit.com/

http://www.webtype.com/

http://www.fontdeck.com/

http://kernest.com/

The best news for last…

There are many more and new ser­vices com­ing online all the time… But the one that is mak­ing a big splash right now is from…

Drum roll… You love me, you hate em, you can’t live with­out em… Google. Yes, they now have a great new font host­ing ser­vice. It’s easy to use [for us tech savvy web devel­op­ers] and all the fonts are free. Some restric­tions may apply such as lim­it­ing use to only the web with print projects not allowed. It’s best to check each one.

You still might not be able to have the exact font you want on your web site, but at least now there are some jazz­ier options to pick from that you know are safe/legal to use. What we rec­om­mend is, if they want some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent on your site, hop on over to Google Web Fonts at http://www.google.com/webfonts and pick a few.

We sug­gest you test them using the para­graph option tab as well as the sen­tence option. You want to see how they will look in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. The selec­tion isn’t huge yet but will likely grow over time and as I men­tioned, the ser­vice is free. Pick out a few choices and send your web team [us hope­fully] the names and we’ll know what to do with them. It’s best to keep the final choices for the site  at two, but no harm in send­ing more to pick the two from.