Everyone is justifiably excited about the introduction of Typekit and the possibility of being able to legally use a wider range of typefaces in website designs. Me, too, sort of, although I’ve kind of settled into a comfort zone with the usual batch of web fonts that are currently available.
Will it change everything? Maybe. I don’t know why I’m skeptical about it. It might be that 1) I’m kind of naturally curmudgeonly 2) I wish I had though of it first, or 3) I generally dislike web services.
3 is probably closest to the truth. Unlike a lot of web people, I find it difficult to actually use a huge laundry list of sites to take care of various individual and specialized tasks. I hate paying and paying and paying for all these things as well.
What I hope Typekit does is spur on foundries to develop a license form that they can live with so that designers and organizations can buy direct, skip the middleman, and get the benefits of @font-face as well. I don’t know if Typekit will cover the user license as well—I sort of doubt it—but the idea of buying fonts and then renting them as well bothers me.
I’m also skeptical about how much creativity this will really inspire. More often than not, the typographic thought that goes into a design is spent on navigation and a top-level header. The rest of the copy on the page gets rudely tossed into boxes without much thought about size or rhythm. In most cases, I’m betting the custom typeface will join the glowing balls, floor shadows, and gradients as Web 2.0 becomes Web 3.0—that is, another piece of fluff on otherwise ordinary designs.
I could be wrong. It will be interesting to hear more details on Typekit as they move forward to launch.