The other day I stumbled across Typekit. Founded by a San Francisco based startup called Small Batch. This service oozes professionalism and class, and its the kind of idea that I think might actually, finally, solve the problem of lackluster typography on the web…maybe.

A little bit of research on the company shows that they are pretty serious about what they do, having made substantial contributions to the corner stone of every site online these days; Google Analytics. What they are doing with Typekit is approaching font foundries and (I guess) buying licenses to serve their fonts to anyone who signs up. They then distribute the fonts you select with your account to a nominated domain, and voila; you can set tags, classes or ids which will have custom font-family properties given to them by a small slice of javascript code which you include in the head tag of your page. Its that simple. Massive kudos go out to them for their UI design and the methods they are using to implement their service. It really is top notch.

“But what about the fonts?” you say. Well, of course they don’t have the big names on board yet (the service is relatively new), but after such a long time coping with about four different usable typefaces online, anything new is a breath of fresh air to me. My main concern at this point is how the deployment of the service works. There’s a limitation on the number of websites they will serve fonts to per account. If you want to place fancy fonts on your client’s website well, I guess you are going to be footing the bill for that. I’m not sure if many clients would understand the intricacies of good typography and why they have to pay more for something they can read fine for free. Then again, perhaps that’s just about focusing on making your pitches better. Also, its worth mentioning that they aren’t supporting all browsers yet; only IE, Safari and Firefox get Typekit love. It would be good to see Chrome creep into that list soon, I can’t imagine it would be too hard seeing that they’re already supporting Safari.

All in all, Typekit is a pretty awesome service. While I don’t think that the fonts in the Trial account are all that good, signing up did let me experience the pure simplicity and speed which they are offering, and honestly it did its job. I can definitely see myself upgrading to a paid account in the near future.