Solving the Challenges of Asian Web Fonts
Monotype’s Bill Davis was honored to give a presentation at the ATypI Hong Kong 2012 Conference titled “Solving the Challenges of Asian Web Fonts.” When he looked at the top 1000 websites, he found that 10 to 15 percent are already using Web fonts. But for East Asian languages and scripts, only a handful has started to deploy Web fonts. His AtypI presentation, provided here as a slideshare, examines the two primary challenges for developers of Asian websites: 1) Website design issues and 2) Asian Web font file sizes.
His experience with the broad range of language and script support available in Fonts.com Web Fonts service has allowed him to gain insights into early adoption of non-Latin and Asian Web fonts by Web designers and developers.
This slideshare reviews some of the main benefits of Web fonts, no matter the language or geographic market for your audience, are:
• Establish typographic consistency
• Improve user experience
• Eliminate the use of text as graphics, improve workflow
• Enhance SEO, accessibility
To learn more about Web fonts, check out Bill Davis’ Fonts.com blog at http://blog.fonts.com/contributors/bill-davis
For more information on Fonts.com Web Font Services, check out http://www.fonts.com/web-fonts
7. Web fonts are easy!
You simply use CSS to define your fonts:
{font-family: “MyCustom Font", "Hiragino Kaku
Gothic", Osaka, "MS PGothic", Arial, sans-serif;}
The fonts can be located:
Local
Downloaded
Linked to a Web font service
8. Leading Web font services
Google.com/webfonts 554 font families
Typekit.com 776 font families
Fonts.com 2000 + font families
WebInk.com 993 + font families
FontDeck.com 992 font families
Webtype.com 70 + font families
Typotheque.com 55 font families
11. Asian Web font services
Japan: Korea:
Typesquare.com
(Morisawa) China:
Fontplus.jp justFont.com
Dekomoji.jp
amanaimages.com
Mojidepa.com
12. So what’s the challenge?
Site Design
Text-heavy websites
System fonts are tuned for small sizes
Web fonts benefit headlines
HTML5 – Flash replacement
23. Asian font subsetting
Pre-subsetting or Dynamic subsetting
Build custom fonts for each web page
Smaller font files
Offered by Web font services