Introducing Cloud Typography Webfonts by H&FJ
typography.com
typography.com
Also, check out this section for a laugh: http://www.typography.com/cloud/how-it-works/#the-delivery-a... . "It constructs an application capable of recognizing requests from different browsers." Apparently a few lines of CSS counts as "an application" these days.
edit: ok, I didn't read their EULA. Nevermind.
Concerning the service itself: according to their product page, H&FJ requires you to include a remote stylesheet rather than javascript. I would say this is the "minimum viable evil" if you are striving to centralize distribution of your webfonts; while annoying, there are some advantages for the user (in this case, free Akamai).
Edit: I just checked a couple of torrent search engines and, apparently, there are not many up-to-date torrents for H&FJ typefaces. In hindsight, I suppose that the population of individuals who are likely to share files illegally and that of professional/dedicated designers have very little overlap.
http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/webfonts/
I suspect other foundries will follow them eventually, because competition from things like Google Web fonts and younger typographers is going to make it very difficult to justify refusing to allow use on the web without a subscription and reliance on a third-party server.
I much prefer paying once for a font and then using it indefinitely, and I'd prefer to compensate a type designer directly for that, instead of paying a foundry. So to me a model where you buy a copy of the font direct from the designer would be more attractive.
I suspect they'll learn better with time, just as other content creation industries have learned or are learning.
It is artificial to use a subscription model for something that is basically a one-off resource. Compare the web font services with licensing fonts for printing or licensing just about any other stock resource for web development, for example.
It seems particularly odd for a foundry that normally aims at the high end of the market like H&FJ to go down this path. Not to belittle all the hard work that no doubt went into these fonts, but at text sizes, on today's screens, on an average quality web site, many visitors aren't simply going to see much difference between a good free font and the most finely-tuned Gotham or Archer, and they're certainly not going to see much difference between a good commercial font from one of the established services that charge significantly less and anything H&FJ offer. However, the pricing model they've picked here appears to be aiming for mainstream rather than the kind of exclusive/high-end sites where their extra polish might be in its element and necessary to maintain the look of quality that the site wants to show.
No doubt they'll be successful anyway, at least for a while, as plenty of places seem happy to jump on the bandwagon at the moment. But I wonder how long this X-as-a-Service gold rush to the cloud will last for before decision-makers start openly questioning whether all these mechanics are just a way of grabbing revenue and whether the extra costs they pay are really justified. Most parts of the tech industry already seem to be going the other way.
For example: The ability to specify a font subset, so that only the 7 glyphs you actually use in your company name can be downloaded instead of the entire font, changing the data moved for just that single transaction from several megabytes to a few kilobytes. Extrapolate that to a handful of faces and a few hundred thousand visits and it adds up pretty quick.
Not to mention you can now stop using Comic Sans. :o)
Their typography foundry is held to be second-to-none among typeface quality and frequency of usage in print and elsewhere.
In particular, their typeface Gotham is incredibly popular, and making it available as a webfont publicly is a big deal.
Also, this effort has been underway for at least three years. Their attention to detail ensures that these webfonts are going to be some of the best available anywhere.
H&FJ is practically THE type foundry for original typefaces. They compete on quality rather than price or other tangible benefits. Unfortunately, it's been impossible to license H&FJ type for real web use until now.
The most likely group of people who will use this are type enthusiasts who prefer H&FJ type to the competition's. I can predict there are a lot of designers who will use this service for their personal or business sites.
As a competitive offering, though, this doesn't cut it. Buying individual fonts feels outdated to web font users, and the prices don't match up to Typekit (free with Adobe CC) or Monotype/Linotype ($10/month without a ridiculous 5 font cap).
H&FJ has chosen their business model, and they'd like to avoid the brand dilution of having poorly designed sites overusing their type. It's an interesting choice, and I hope it works out for them.
Prior to launching Cloud Typography, H+FJ didn't sell web fonts at all. Things seemed to have been going pretty well for them.
The people who like H&FJ for the quality will subscribe and use this service, while those looking for a commodity option will avoid it -- perhaps even to the benefit of H&FJ.
I know I'll subscribe shortly, which is why I hope this works for their business. It really is an interesting decision when compared to the providers whose offerings keep dropping in price to compete in a commodity market.
The pricing advertised on their site appears to contradict you.
They seem to be aiming for the mainstream market rather than exclusivity, yet their prices are uncompetitive by mainstream standards, which seems an odd strategy.
This is the first offering that matches the H&FJ to quality. For instance, my favorite font at the moment is Ideal Sans. The concept here is to infuse a sans serif with an almost handlettered quality. There are no straight lines. Consequently it's hard to make it look good for the screen, period, let alone at small sizes. But they've done it.
http://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/
RandsInRepose.com has been beta testing it and it's gotten notably better over the past year, I think.
Nevertheless, its recent popularity is due to its status as best-legal-webfont-alternative to Gotham - at least, until today.
The pricing is absurd. They think I'm going to shell out $10k/yr for using their web fonts? Where's the value here? Where's the return on my investment? If I'm spending $10k/yr on fonts, they better generate some additional revenue on my end. Also, my users better be jumping out of their seats at how impressive the difference is with and without their fonts. That's simply not the case though. I'm not in the business of throwing money out the window, and it could be better invested in countless other places.
Join Cloud.typography and get your first five webfont packages FREE.
Choose from among H&FJ’s complete library of type families, known for
their plentiful styles and rich typographic features, each carefully engineered
to be fully functional in the browser.
Already purchased H&FJ fonts? Log in and start your subscription, and you’ll
find all your fonts available to use with Cloud.typography at no additional cost.
Buy fonts for your computer, and they’ll instantly appear in your
Cloud.typography webfont library, too.
Now, instead, they're using the same technology as just about everyone else, under their own service, and just rehinted their typefaces to match the tech.
[1] http://kottke.org/12/03/kottkeorg-redesign-2012-version
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20110707053012/http://www.typogra...
Presumably, because of blocked referrers.
Damn. I was so looking forward to using small-sized Whitney as a body font, because it looks amazing.
So do Adobe, and Ascender, and other professional foundries, and several of their font families are available completely free.
Despite all the praise for H&FJ's quality from some posters here, I've got Photoshop and a 400% zoom that says their screen fonts still have to fit on the same limited number of pixels as everyone else's, and inevitably, the pixels that get turned on are similar to other well-hinted fonts at small sizes.
I've tried a few experiments, and I'm not seeing anything to suggest that H&FJ have some magic new technology that means their fonts are going to render better than everyone else's. Indeed, the quality of rendering in Firefox on Windows 7 appears to be somewhat variable: even some of the fonts on the linked page, such as the Whitney small caps used in headings, are far from crisp. The Archer small caps if you click through the "Learn More" link also seem to have obvious rendering/hinting problems at the top of many of the glyphs (and don't look anything like the "Firefox Windows" screenshot they show on their "Render Quality" page).
If there are free web fonts that have all those, they are hard to find. (I don't even know how to use old-style figures ordinarily, although I'm not an expert in these things. But they imply that they have some custom (probably hacky cause that's what it would take) solution to some special glyphs "Cloud-typography includes tools for implementing advanced typographic features, and delivering them even to browsers that aren't designed to support advanced typography"; )
But yeah, clearly the market is people who care about things like in that list. Some of which are _very_ rarely seen on the web right now; if this leads to them being seen on the web more, it may increase the number of people who know what a 'non-lining figure' is, and then increase the market of people who want such things. And hopefully increase the number of free fonts that have em too (although you can have all those features and still be a poorly-designed font), as well as lead to actual standard ways to do things like text figures on the web.