Typekit Goes to Adobe
Monday, October 03, 2011 07:07 PM
Earlier today the web font service Typekit announced that it has been acquired by Adobe. Is it time to host your own fonts (again)?
There has been quite the mixed reaction to this. Not only people completely against it and those totally for it, but most comments and tweets I’ve seen in reaction to the announcement show most people (myself included) both happy for those currently working for Typekit and worried about the future.
It seems that a lot of people in the web industry have a love/hate relationship with Adobe. While they make the best design products out there, they aren’t particularly loved for all the flaws software of that size comes often has. They’ve been known to not manage new acquisitions the best. Hello Macromedia. And honestly, how often does a big company snapping up an innovative small one end well for said innovation? It seems that the large corporations can’t innovate on their own so they just make a business of buying up other people’s brilliant work and calling it their own.
But what I’m really worried about is the future. I use Typekit on a handful of sites. I would like to continue doing so. But this is a hosted service. And just like Delicious and relics of the past like GeoCities, we’ve seen that if you don’t have the data on your own server, you cannot be sure it will always be there for you. Fonts are hardly your own content, but the idea is the same. If you don’t “own” it, you could lose it. If things go south, I’m going to really wish I just purchased the font licensing and hosted them myself. Yeah, it’s a bit more of a hassle for sure, and with all the little adjustments in rendering Typekit does to help, it isn’t quite the same as hosting your own email. Nevertheless, this just seems to add to the argument to host your own stuff so you can keep it around. Like everyone else, I really hope Adobe proves us all wrong and continues to supply a fantastic font embedding service at a reasonable price.
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