

TYPEKIT VS FONTSTAND HOW TO
"Eventually we figured out how to get the web server to talk to our database and then authorize a credit card, still done with a dial-up modem. In time, a 56K "digital" connection to the Internet was added, which allowed customers all over the world to connect without long distance rates. Downloads could take up to one hour, requiring four to six modems (phone lines) to handle the demand. Created by long-time Emigre collaborator, Tim Starback, the original system - called "Now Serving" - was built using FirstClass. In addition to being one of the first companies to design original fonts made on and for a computer, Emigre Fonts was the first to sell licenses and transfer digital fonts online. Robin Kinross analyzed these fonts in a 1992 article for Eye Magazine: "The early productions were rationalised by reference to the requirements of low-memory computing and low-resolution screen display and printer output, and show considerate ingenuity in juggling with a heavily reduced formal repertoire, to make coherent sets of characters." Continuing to embrace advances in technology, Licko later produced vector-based design. Rather than adhering to the aesthetics of metal type optimized for letterpress printing, Licko began designing fonts that embraced the limitations of bitmap graphics endemic to early PCs and the idiosyncrasies of dot matrix printing. It was the start of Emigre Fonts." Ĭoinciding with the advent of the Macintosh computer, Emigre took advantage of the new medium to design digital typefaces without requiring the equipment or manufacturing infrastructure of a traditional type foundry. We had a lot of inquiries about the availability of these typefaces that no one had seen before. Issue #3 was the turning point for my typeface experiments and for the magazine, as it was typeset entirely using my first Lo-Res fonts. Rudy had started it (with two Dutch artists) as a showcase for émigré artists. It was Emigre magazine that opened up these options. I didn’t have a client for these fonts, nor did I plan to start a type foundry. “When I started building Macintosh bitmap fonts in 1984, it was a purely experimental endeavour. In a 2002 interview with Rhonda Rubinstein for Eye Magazine, Licko recalled the early days of her type design and the important relationship between the magazine and the foundry: Files are only cached if they are originally from a server that's behind CloudFlare.Emigre Fonts was founded as an independent foundry in 1985 quickly following the release of the first issue of Emigre magazine in 1984. On another note: CloudFlare usually doesn't cache external resources (such as fonts served by TypeKit) on webpages. I personally respect CloudFlare because they always are extremely upfront about issues and post detailed post-mortems right away. Some networks have more robust setups than others. Additionally, all providers have outages every now and then. If your site suddenly becomes hugely popular, you won't get a huge bill from CloudFlare, while you would with TypeKit. The really nice thing about CloudFlare is that they don't charge based on pageviews/bandwidth (TypeKit charges by views). If you host the font files themselves, you can put CloudFlare in front of your server to cache and deliver the files. Ideally, you should use a CDN (content delivery network) to speed up load times by serving the files from locations distributed around the world.

Font files can make up a large portion of a page filesize and load time. There are performance, cost and stability trade-offs when choosing where to host your font files.
