Web fonts: the talk of Typ09

"Web fonts" are one of the hot topics of Typ09, the conference of ATypI in Mexico City later this month.

Posted on 10 October 2009 by Mark Barratt,

With more web browsers supporting a tag to bring new fonts onto web pages (Microsoft has done so since 1997), a tipping point has been reached in the design world. Designers are excited about the idea that they can use fonts other than the "core set" with the familiar Verdana and Georgia. They are finding out how to get them to users of all the different web browsers.

There are several competing formats in use (EOT, supported in Internet Explorer 4 and above; regular TrueType and OpenType fonts, supported in Safari and Firefox; and more recently WOFF [Web Open Font Format], which will be supported in the upcoming version of FireFox), but a number of well-known type foundries and some interesting startups are promising to solve that problem. Web sites may soon be a much richer place for typography, and perhaps even easier to read.

Participants for this track include:

• David Berlow of the Font Bureau, who is keynoting the main conference
• Roger Black, a New York designer who is introducing web fonts at MIT.edu this month
• John Daggett and Jonathan Kew of Mozilla, the organization that owns the Firefox browser
• Jeff Veen and Brian Mason of Typekit, a new site that will distribute web fonts
• Frank Wildenberg of Linotype, a company dating from the hot metal era that is active in new technology
• John D. Berry, recently hired by Microsoft to help improve typography across Microsoft products, and president of ATypI

Typ09 is the first annual congress of the Association Typographique Internationale to be held in Latin America. Members of ATypI are type designers, typographers, and type foundries from all over the world.

The five-day event starts Monday, October 26 at MIDE, the technology museum in the historic downtown, "El Centro." The web-font sessions will be held at Anáhuac University, host and co-sponsor of the conference, as part of a series of workshops on Thursday and Friday, the 26th and 27th.

http://www.atypi.org/news_tool/news_html?newsid=509&from=/