Some of us have been experiencing the internet since the early 90’s. In 1992 the first commercial companies started offering internet access to users. Since then the internet has grown and changed drastically, but there are a few things which have remained constant.

• Arial
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Tahoma
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana

I’m sure most of you recognize this as the holy list of web-safe fonts. Web designers and developers are as familiar to this list as their oldest pair of shoes. For almost 20 years almost 100% of what we read on the internet has been displayed with only these fonts. Thankfully, this could soon be changing. Thanks to something called “Web Open Format”, or WOFF.

Websites are styled with font information in .CSS files. Within these there are “font-face” elements which call your system fonts into play. Now, WOFF builds on that technology by adding compression and downloading font packages with metadata about typeface sellers, and copyright information to keep type designers happy who own the rights. The dilemma has always been that Type Foundries have licenses for the fonts they create or buy. Designers and developers can’t just give out these font files to people who visit their website, so they are relying on you owning the font on your local machine. Thanks to participation by all the big players; type foundries, browser software companies, and web authors, now us web users may finally get websites with a richer diversity of fonts.

Type designers and foundries aren’t all going to just give away the rights to their fonts, so designers and developers can purchase usage-based subscriptions to enable use of these commercial typefaces. Now that the technology exists, some companies are offering open-source types. Google now offers free fonts for the web. Designers and developers are free to use these at no cost since they’re open-source and finally we can get some diversity in our websites without resorting to images of text.

Now, all you traditionalists out there might start biting your nails and getting worried. Concerns about visual abuse of terrible fonts thrown around are legitimate. Certainly not all designers and developers will put this new power to good use. We may find ourselves rallying against overused poorly designed typefaces, much in the way people now avoid Comic Sans and Helvetica at all costs. As a whole, however, I am overjoyed with the possibilities this will bring. For too long, print designers look disparagingly at web designers as merely technical individuals without aesthetic taste. It’s true for the last 20 years we’ve been stuck with roughly 7 mediocre web fonts, and print designers have had more creative freedom. Now, the days of book and magazine and brochure design is slowly dying, in favor of cheaper, more accessible, digital design for web. Finally print designers won’t have to be ashamed to become web designers. They can even render manuscripts from Popish Priests with HTML now.