Oct 07

Embedded Fonts – A Bad Idea

Embedding fonts in your website through CSS has been a widely anticipated feature. A recent post at A List Apart has brought more light to this issue recently. The excitement behind this revolves mostly around removing creative limitations and improving readability through better typography.

However, I anticipate the use of embedded fonts will make things much worse, before they get better. Stephen Coles and I are in much agreement on the issue.

TrueType for the Masses

For those unfamiliar with the concept of embedded fonts, it’s simply a CSS font-family rule that would not only designate the name of the font to be used, but also include the full font for automatic downloading.

In a nutshell, it allows for web designers to use any truetype font on their websites.

Moving toward the Extremes

Years of usability research has proved that an increase in available options has made websites much, much better or much, much worse. Currently we are limited in our use of fonts, and as such, we use fonts that experienced typographers have put together for us.

As any of our clients will tell you, I’m a huge advocate of specialized labor. By that I mean, you should allow people to do what they are good at and not much else. Traditionally, web designers are not great at typography.

Of course, there are web designers who are phenomenal typographers. Undoubtedly, their typography would improve dramatically. However, these designers are in the minority. Professional typographers agree, almost across the board, that great typography is transparent – That it should go unnoticed. Custom font-faces will surely lead to the opposite effect.

Licensing

Good fonts cost money, and lots of it. Adobe Font Folio is $2600.00 for example. Fonts are not currently priced for use in a distributed format, although a few EULA’s do mention the use of embedding. Rather, they are licensed for use on a single computer, just like software. When you start talking about licensing fonts for use across the web, to hundreds of thousands of users, pricing becomes a much larger issue… or does it?

I think professional fonts will be cost-prohibitive for the average web design agency to license. As a result, I expect most designers to rely on free font alternatives. Thats a scary thought.

John Gruber, the Helvetica-addict, has had this to say:

The fonts you’re allowed to embed legally aren’t worth using; the fonts that are worth using aren’t embeddable.

John Gruber

Inevitability

This change is coming, there’s no combating it. It’s been released as a part of the CSS3 Roadmap using the @font-family attribute. In fact, it’s already been implemented by Safari 3.

About Josh Walsh

Josh Walsh is a Managing Partner at Designing Interactive. He's also an award winning designer, author and speaker on the topics of User Experience Design, User Interface Design and Usability Research. You can follow him on twitter at: @joshwalsh

4 Comments »

Danny Sedor

Oh. Joy.

October 9, 2007
Wolfgang Löer

Ah, interesting perspective!

Its true, that the freedom of font-choice will lead to many bad choices and many worse sites especially on the private/amateur level.

But i don’t agree with your overall negative verdict – i like to rather see the possibility of improvements on the higher/pro-level websites and especially my new possibilities as a professional web designer/developer.

Some counter-arguments:

a)”web designers are not great at typography”:
- at least where i work your “specialized labor” (very good concept indeed) wouldn’t really be comprimised. we already often enough get layout-screens from rather traditional designers (i.e. with typography-experience). they will be happy about the new options!

b)”we use fonts that experienced typographers have put together for us”
- uh, sort of. there is a grand total of like nine fonts/families of web-significance, half of which are good/ok to use for normal reading-text. those fonts were done by professionals but they are far from being “the definite best possible web-fonts”; we use them, because they are the only options period.

For creative Headings, very small Text or for example handwriting-type there is no choice at all.

the ability to finally make new usable web-fonts will certainly lead to many new and even free (think opensource programming) pro-level fonts for various uses.

c) licensing
This sadly is a problem. it exists, because the fonts once downloaded can’t be protected from other uses by the client.
the lone fact that millions will see it (on a website) shouldn’t be a problem however, since you also can produce and distribute infinite print-products, from your one pc-license without additional fees.

d) professional fonts will be cost-prohibitive
- if they will be similarly costed to font-licenses for print, i don’t see why (professional) web-designers couldn’t afford what print-designers have for ages.

also i expect the browsers to offer options like “no custom fonts” etc. so you can default to the usual webfonts if it gets all too bad.

Hope, i didn’t sound too harsh

Best Greetings,
Wolfgang

December 13, 2008
Josh Walsh

@Wolfgang – Not harsh at all. In fact, I agree with you, mostly.

The vast majority of all websites are still built by amateurs. The top websites have higher quality, and these websites will have extra flexibility in their designs while still taking the user experience into consideration.

I fear the impact on small online businesses the most.

December 13, 2008
Ron van den Boogaard

I tend to disagree here; the more tools proficient designers get the better and any tool the ignorent designers get; they will budge those up.

However I recently ran into another issue, which makes an argument against implementing @font-face. When implementing this on a news-site where we had an .otf licensed to us, it turned out that the IE-variations were trying to make the http call to the font and of course couldn’t, thereby slowing down performance for these browsers. Which made us decide to pull this feature.

January 4, 2009