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.