Sometimes it surprises me that the internet has been in the mainstream for about 15 years and we’re still stuck with roughly 10 dependable fonts to use on the web (4 of which are used for everything). Sure, there are some CSS and JavaScript tricks you can try to embed different fonts, but none of these solutions are supported with enough regularity to be of any use. It gets old having to bog down my sites with images or Flash if I want to use the designers originally intended font.
Thankfully, it looks like a solution may soon be on the horizon. Services like TypeKit and Fontdeck are attempting to build a simple, licensed font repository where you can pay a subscription fee in exchange for using certain fonts on your web projects. The goal is to give designers an inexpensive and effective way to broaden their font horizons.
Ars Technica has a great read on the current state of web fonts and proposed solutions up on their site. It sounds like we’ll soon be freed from our Arial-prisons.
Web font services join fray as .webfont format gains support [via Ars Technica]
Wow! This is probably one of my top gripes when I design a website. I feel so limited when it comes to fonts that I think the design suffers because of it. With all the other technological advances, you’d think having more than a handful of fonts to use would be basic. Hope that solution works out