Typekit Test

Late Friday evening, as I was working on my UXCampLondon presentation, I received a Typekit invitation. I haven't had the chance to try it out until now.

So, I've run a quick test of Typekit on this blog. For the moment, I've chosen to use the Trial account, which has a fairly limited selection of fonts.

This morning, I was in something of a Charles Rennie Mackintosh mood, so I've chosen to use Hicks Design's Hill House for the headings on this site.

If you are on a browser that supports the CSS3 @font-face rule (Internet Explorer 4+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3.1+), then this blog should be Art-Nouveau-tastic.

So far, I like Typekit. Registration and signup was fairly straightforward. Browsing the fonts for the library you are currently subscribed to is easy, and the tags make it even easier to locate an appropriate font. And Typekit's JavaScript and CSS instructions make installing the fonts on your site a snap.

I had two minor issues, both concerning font browsing

The first is that I'd like to be able to search for a font. I knew I wanted to try Hill House. It would have much easier to search for it, rather than try to guess which tag it would fall under. This turned out to be pretty easy with the relatively small Trial Library, but I suspect this will become more important if I upgrade to one of the larger libraries.

The second issue concerns deciding whether or not I want to upgrade. I haven't found a way of browsing Typekit's Personal and Full font libraries. I'd like to have a look at the fonts before I make a decision to upgrade. I'm currently deciding whether or not to upgrade, and Typekit's libraries page (you'll need a Typekit account to see that page) only displays the names of the fonts.

All in all, Typekit is a fantastic service if you want to embed fonts that you would otherwise have to pay large sums of money to license. I suspect I'll probably be paying for the service., but I really would like to be able to see what I'll be getting before I make that decision.

Update: As you can see from the comments, the two issues that I flagged in this post are known issues, and should be resolved soon. Given the responsiveness of the Typekit team (and on a weekend, too), I've upgraded the to the Personal Plan to get a look at all those fonts I'm missing.

Update 2: I've just noticed that TypeKit has added "view the fonts" links on their libraries page, which makes evaluating the fonts before you buy much easier.