Many thanks to Typekit for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. As a matter of fact I decided to sign up for a Typekit account about two weeks ago. (They didn’t give me any sort of deal — I paid for it myself with my own money.)
Before I signed up for Typekit I had a few preconceived notions about it. That: (a) installing Typekit would be difficult; (b) using Typekit would slow my site down; and (c) I had no need for custom typefaces for the sake of branding my site.
However, since Typekit offers a free 30-day trial I decided to give it a shot. It was one of those evenings where you feel like hacking away on some code, and I figured it’d be a chance to have fun and educate myself on precisely how Typekit actually works. Well, I learned that all three of my assumptions about Typekit were wrong.
For one, Typekit was incredibly easy to set up. I simply picked out the header and body fonts I wanted to use, added them to my “kit”, put some javascript code into my site’s header and then changed what typefaces are first in my CSS file’s font stack.
Secondly, my “kit” only weighs in at 196K, or about the size of a few screenshots. I’ve noticed no lag or issues with the loading of the site.
And Thirdly, the branding issue: Yes the typefaces I’m using are unique, but more importantly is that I find the site more readable than it was before. I used to use Lucida Grande as my body font. It was too small at 12px and at 13px it starts looking ugly. Now I use Gesta which is very open and has a generous x-height. It looks great on the screen and I think make the site very readable.