Adobe acquires Typekit

I have some conflicted feelings.

On one hand, I'm happy for Typekit team, if everything turns out the way they hope. Possible integration with Photoshop / DreamWeaver could help bring better fonts to the web, help them grow, invite more type foundries, and so on.

On the other hand, Adobe quite often ruin things they acquire, and that would be just terrible, because Typekit was by far the best service for web fonts. Google fonts are quite crappy, FontDeck doesn't have the best foundries, and Fonts.com is expensive, and their fonts are less optimized for the web.

So here's to the bright future of Typekit, in which the service remains great and inexpensive.

I liked Typekit. I hope Adobe won't run it into the ground, like the rest of the companies they've acquired.

From the email I just got (I'm a paying customer):

""" If you’re one of our customers, this announcement means things will only get better. Typekit will remain a standalone product, as well as become a vital part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Our team will stay together, and we’re excited to start working on even easier ways to integrate web fonts into your workflow. """

They're saying all the right things: standalone product, team staying together, etc, sure hope so.

I, for one, am looking forward to Adobe Air-powered Typekit Installation packages containing native OSX installers that spit out HTML snippets.

From a historical perspective, this certainly feels like a logical, organic acquisition for both Typekit and Adobe. But it's disappointing that they didn't exit into the arms of Google. Google Web Fonts could have used the help and passion. They apparently danced, but unfortunately didn't leave the ball together:

http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.htm...

http://blog.typekit.com/2010/05/19/typekit-and-google/

It's unlikely this will result in the kind of innovation or even disruption that a Google/Typekit union could have provided.

Edit: Removed unnecessarily negative language.

If you're in the UK (or, heck, outside of the US), start saving up for when the standard Adobe currency conversion rates of $1 = £2 come into action ;-)

Price will increase, service will decrease. I'm happy for those at Typekit who cashed out, too bad for the users...

It's interesting to see Typekit guys cashing out. I bet the price was pretty solid. I remember, when I first tried their service in 2009, the first impression was wow, it works!. Not only in technological aspect. It felt that the Startup worked. The timing and niche instantly became to be "naturally clear". Two years passed and we see here a nice cash out. Meanwhile: let's step up and do something wow, it works. Stripe has started doing it in 2011. And probably many more.

I love Typekit. I think Adobe knows better than to mess with the product itself. However the pricing model is pretty low by Adobe standards. I hope that doesn't change.

Typekit is an excellent service for the price, but the main reason I've remained a committed customer and evangelist is their constant drive to improve. I love that they've worked so hard to improve font rendering on Windows (which I'm sure is a huge pain in the ass) and that they encourage foundries to hint their fonts (which improves rendering for everyone). I hope that this acquisition won't hinder that kind of initiative.

Like everyone else, I'm happy for the founders. But as a Typekit customer, I was pretty disappointed to see their email announcement about this today.

They were doing well and were on to something big - why did they have to sell now? I love their product, but they still have such a long way to go and so much they could improve on. It just seems so early and unnecessary.

Maybe if the chorus rises loud enough, Adobe management will get a clue and not ruin Typekit.

TypeKit served a purpose, but cross-browser support for @font-face has largely obsoleted them.

Latest versions of Safari and Firefox and Google Chrome support @font-face and Opera is planning to support it soon.

Just got the $49.99/year plan, I've been considering it and I figure if Adobe are going to raise prices they'll hopefully let older customers stick to their original pricing... so maybe I got a good deal.

Oh no.

Now that Adobe has bought Typekit I anticipate an HTML5 version of Adobe Bridge® bundled with Adobe® Typekit® Master Collection® 6.0…

Typekit is a funny concept to me. While I can respect and admire their ability to build a successful company, I think the blog post shows just how rose-tinted are the spectacles worn by these font services:

    Second, we could innovate on the business side as well.
    We could sell fonts as a service, and use a subscription
    model to eliminate Byzantine licensing and usage issues.

I wonder how much money they would have made if they'd sold fonts with a simple, one-term commercial licence fee, just like stock photography, music, icons, etc.

I know there's no way I could ever use their services with any of the clients I've had, because you simply can't factor in an ongoing cost that is unrestricted and controlled by a third party when giving a fixed price quote for most clients. However, I've spent significant amounts of my own and various companies' money to buy good quality fonts for other uses, and would surely have done so for web fonts as well if anyone was willing to take my money on that basis.

    Few sites used web fonts when we got started;
    today, new sites seldom launch without them.
    Typekit now serves nearly three billion fonts
    per month on over one million different sites,
    including some of the most recognized brands
    on the web.

Well, good for them, but since Netcraft reckon there are currently over 400 million Web sites and there are only a handful of font services, that suggests to me that perhaps 1% of the Web is actually using these services.

    From the start, our vision has been to make
    the web more beautiful, readable, and fast.

Unfortunately, what they've actually done is cause millions of pages to look terrible, indeed sometimes outright illegible, because most of their screen fonts simply aren't as good at body text sizes as the tried and tested Georgia, Verdana, etc. And there is no way that downloading a font from a third party service, even one with a great CDN, is faster than using a native one that's already installed locally.

Herein lies the fundamental problem with the whole web-font-as-service concept: at body sizes, there is rarely enough difference at typical screen resolutions to justify a change from the old favourites (and such changes are usually ill-advised anyway), while for one-off uses like headings and pull quotes where distinctive fonts can make a worthwhile impact, the web design community was managing just fine already.

As higher resolution screens become the norm, perhaps this will change, just as tiny pixel-drawn icons are giving way to scalable vector-based artwork (but it really shows on smaller or lower-resolution screens where you do still want a 16x16 or 32x32 icon and the vectors haven't been carefully crafted to fit pixel-perfect at that kind of scale). Even then, it's hard to see how you can justify paying a substantial amount of cash every month to use fonts on web sites, when no other on-line stock resources work that way and fonts for other uses don't work that way either.

Still, I wish them well, if only for the benefit of those users who can fit in with their business model and do find it worthwhile. I don't share the pessimism of some here about the Adobe takeover, because one of the few things Adobe has pretty much always done well both technically and in terms of management/legal stuff is fonts.