Adrian Hanft III of Colorado has made a great point about fonts:
You don’t need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don’t need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don’t need to own Times to read the Times. You don’t need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane. And yet this same logic doesn’t apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser.
He goes on to outline five steps to font freedom. Not without controversy, perhaps his best thought is to see the classic type forms of history remastered by an open source digital typography project.
Alas, that still leaves us with the challenge of how to get those classic faces distributed to the world in an effective fashion. And then (dare I ask it) — would we like the appearance of the Web if the font floodgates were opened up? Is it perhaps the restraining effect of the limited number of universally-distributed typefaces that ensures some relative degree of readability and usability on the Web?
Leave a comment