Adobe acquires Typekit

http://blog.typekit.com/2011/10/03/adobe-acquires-typekit/

by jcsalterego • 15 years ago

179 35 15 years ago

blog.typekit.com

flixic2• 15 years ago

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.

masnick• 15 years ago

I agree with the parent...when I saw this headline, I immediately thought of this blog: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/.

markbao2• 15 years ago

Fonts.com has an excellent webfonts offering which includes name-brand fonts like Frutiger, Helvetica Neue, Avenir, and others.

flixic2• 15 years ago

Yes, but they are more than 4 times as expensive, and most of their fonts are not optimized for the web (unlike Typekit's).

briandear• 15 years ago

Let's hope so. I would like Typekit to be integrated better with Adobe products, but not at the expense of the core Typekit service.

markbao2• 15 years ago

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

davidedicillo• 15 years ago

I agree. And hopefully won't require some ugly software in order to use it.

reustle2• 15 years ago

Don't worry, it will seamlessly work. They're just going to push out a change via the hosted JS that injects flash elements to display the fonts.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

To be fair (and I have a tough time of it with Adobe), a lot of their suite was acquired. They seem to be able to transition products fairly well for a large company.

smackfu• 15 years ago

Yeah, much of what is now synonymous with the Adobe brand name is from the acquisition of Macromedia.

mtgentry• 15 years ago

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.

reustle2• 15 years ago

Oh no.

jfb2• 15 years ago

This was my reaction, and the reaction of three people who walked past my desk and saw the announcement. Good for the Typekit guys, and thanks for the service, but my faith in Adobe not balling things up is shaky.

hsmyers• 15 years ago

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

citricsquid• 15 years ago

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.

krosaen• 15 years ago

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.

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

> even easier ways to integrate

Good, a pure CSS then. Like all other font services these days.

dasil003• 15 years ago

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

czottmann• 15 years ago

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

peterjmag• 15 years ago

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.

sambeau• 15 years ago

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

vilius• 15 years ago

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.

petercooper• 15 years ago

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 ;-)

Silhouette2• 15 years ago

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.

ddagradi2• 15 years ago

[Disclaimer: My business licenses fonts via Typekit]

Blaming Typekit for bad design is an interesting choice. Might as well blame browsers for giving designers access to millions of terrible color choices via CSS while you're at it. Blame bad designers for not knowing how to use fonts.

The community was not doing a good job with custom fonts for headings, pull quotes, etc. @font-face works pretty well, but foundries clearly weren't willing to sell licenses for it the same way they do for print/commercial use. It's not a difficult thing to explain to clients - it's a recurring fee just like hosting, SSL certificates, and domain registration. It handles all cross-browser issues, saves bandwidth, and gives you, the designer, easy access to a rather large library of fonts at no cost to you. Clients that can't afford the $2-8/month probably can't afford good design to begin with.

If web fonts are too slow for you in all circumstances, how is Typekit any worse than a license from a foundry? Native fonts are great, and should be used extensively, but they really limit your options.

jfb2• 15 years ago

Native fonts are only great if you can guarantee that your viewers have them installed. Otherwise, you're left with a wretched subset of garbage.

Silhouette2• 15 years ago

I'm not blaming Typekit for designers who don't know how to use fonts. I'm blaming Typekit for serving fonts that look terrible on many systems that aren't running the latest and greatest browsers and operating systems (i.e., most of the machines used to browse the web). Many of them don't look that great even on those newer systems either, certainly not rendering with the quality that you would expect from a pro font displayed in a native application running locally on the machine.

For a while shortly after these font-hosting services started going live, every trendy design blog out there started to look worse than it did before, and I couldn't figure out why. For a short time, I actually assumed I'd inadvertently messed up my ClearType settings, or downloaded a dubious update from Microsoft, or found another rendering bug in Firefox, or something along those lines. Then I started to notice these little "T" badges in the corner of the pages that didn't render properly, and discovered the hard way that hardly any web fonts were properly hinted for on-screen use, which is why they all looked horrible compared to things like Verdana and Arial/Helvetica.

To be fair, a few of them are better now. Still, Typekit's own site looks pretty bad on this computer (I've just checked) and the irony is that it's their custom fonts that render like something from the Windows 95 days, while the body text in Georgia looks as clean as usual. It's not exactly a great sales pitch when the part of your site using your technology looks obviously visibly worse than the part of your site using the tried and tested workhorse you're asking us to give up.

[Edit: Here's an example:

http://i.imgur.com/cEGNL.png

Notice that even at display size, the rendering of the heading text in Proxima Nova looks awful. Meanwhile, trusty Georgia even renders with decent italics at body text size.

And it looks that way on several systems here, from Firefox on Windows XP to Chrome on Windows 7, so it's nothing to do with ClearType rendering differences, the Firefox rendering problems with HarfBuzz, or any other such excuse.]

As I've said many times, the reality is that at today's typical screen resolutions, at body text sizes, there are only so many ways you can turn on the pixels that are going to work. We have had a few brilliantly designed fonts created specifically for that usage available to us for a long time. Anything that is supposed to replace them needs to look different enough to be worth the hassle and render at least as clearly, and most/all of the hosted web fonts currently fail to meet one or both of those criteria. I'm sorry if this is some sort of downvote-worthy regressive heresy, but I go by results and the screenshot does not lie.

athst• 15 years ago

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.

redler• 15 years ago

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.

williamle8300• 15 years ago

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.

mnml_• 15 years ago

I have tried to use @font-face on a large website where all the users don't have up to date. All was just getting emails about old versions of safari crashing, ipads crashing chrome crashing etc. I agree with you TypeKit wont be useful forever but for now it's the best solution I have found.

charlieorford• 15 years ago

YMMV but have you tried using this approach:

http://www.fontspring.com/blog/further-hardening-of-the-bull...

We use the above with good results (supports IE6-9, FF, Safari, Android, iOS, Chrome and Opera).

www.airbus.com (a large site) also uses this technique (or at least they did when I last looked).

Adobe acquires Typekit

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