How I Almost Didn’t Obsess over Typefaces
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If you’re a regular reader of this site, something might look a little different.
For the last two years, I’ve been paying for webfonts from Typekit. Around 2010 or so, I noticed that a few sites I read had really nice typefaces. In my mind, they were using sIFR, a method for doing webfonts using Flash. But after looking at the source code of some of those sites, I noticed that they were using Javascript and CSS, two core web technologies, and a service called Typekit. Because they were using these core web technologies, it would be a superior solution to one based on Flash, a resource intensive and proprietary software that famously doesn’t work on iOS devices.
Because I wanted my sites to have nice type too, I subscribed to Typekit’s Personal package. For $25 per year, Typekit allowed me to select from a pool of webfonts and deploy them on two (2) websites. This package came with a limit of 50,000 page views per month, but this site doesn’t get anywhere near that much traffic. It was a great deal for a small and esoteric web operation like this one.
Earlier this week, Typekit announced that they were no longer offering the Personal plan for new customers. Instead, all Personal plan customers would continue to pay $25 per year but would receive all the fonts, not just a selection, and would be able to deploy on an unlimited (∞) number of sites. The only restriction that remains is the 50,000 monthly page views.
This is a big win for me since I now get to use any of Typekits webfonts, including ones that were only available on the $50 yearly plan. One of those fonts that had eluded me was Proxima Nova, among the most popular webfonts on the Internet.
As of Wednesday, the body font for this personal site (my “blog”) is Proxima Nova. It replaces Runda, a very nice and distinct font that I will continue to use as the body font on the professional site. The rest of the fonts remain the same: Adelle Sans for headings and Anonymous Pro for when the situation calls for a monospaced font.
And now that I’ve settle on that, I can at last seek out the difference between a font and a typeface. Do you know?