Express your brand with Web Fonts and TypeKit

You may have noticed that we have updated our site to use our corporate typeface. We are using Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta.

The even more eagle-eyed or technically curious of you might have noticed that this is done with HTML, not Flash replacement.

This has been achieved by using the @font-face CSS command, that allows us to specify a web font in the font stack. Just the same as always, but now we don’t have to hope that the end user has the font on their machine. Web fonts can be downloaded and rendered by the browser. But type foundries have not released licensed fonts, like Meta, before. If you put a normal Web Font onto your server as a downloadable file, then anybody can easily re-use it – fine for free fonts – but not OK for licensed fonts.

However, thanks to the folks at TypeKit we can now get around that problem. Type foundries such as FontFont have allowed their fonts to be served through some clever JavaScript that makes it nigh on impossible for the font file to be used on any other, but the licensed site.

So we thought we’d give it a go on our site (so far just the headings and sub-headings) and see how it performs.

If you can’t see it try a shift-refresh, or you may be using a browser that does not support the @font-face, such as Firefox 3.0 or lower or Google Chrome.

Find out more about how TypeKit works.