
Introducing Cloud Typography Webfonts by H&FJ - halostatue
http://www.typography.com/cloud/welcome/
======
Fauntleroy
Yet again I'll have to use someone's arbitrary font-serving service instead of
using @font-face and hosting the fonts myself. I'd really prefer to just
purchase the font, but this is surely more profitable.

Also, check out this section for a laugh:
[http://www.typography.com/cloud/how-it-works/#the-
delivery-a...](http://www.typography.com/cloud/how-it-works/#the-delivery-
agent) . "It constructs an application capable of recognizing requests from
different browsers." Apparently a few lines of CSS counts as "an application"
these days.

~~~
tptacek
None of the major foundries are OK with you embedding fonts into web pages by
publishing their fonts as resources on the web, there to be downloaded by
anyone else who wants to compose documents with those fonts.

~~~
Historiopode
It seems to me that downloading a subset of a typeface from a webpage would be
less practical than downloading an entire collection from a torrent.

Concerning the service itself: according to their product page, H&FJ requires
you to include a remote stylesheet rather than javascript. I would say this is
the "minimum viable evil" if you are striving to centralize distribution of
your webfonts; while annoying, there are some advantages for the user (in this
case, free Akamai).

Edit: I just checked a couple of torrent search engines and, apparently, there
are not many up-to-date torrents for H&FJ typefaces. In hindsight, I suppose
that the population of individuals who are likely to share files illegally and
that of professional/dedicated designers have very little overlap.

~~~
mkehrt
I may or may not have had no trouble whatsoever pirating an enormous variety
of fonts off a website I found with a quick google search. Maybe torrents just
aren't where they are?

~~~
praxeologist
In my experience too, websites with direct downloads are better. It is easy to
make webfonts even when FontSquirrel marks the font for copyright too if you
have a software like FontLab. Just remove the designer/copyright information
in the Font Info menu.

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bbrunner
What makes this different from typekit? It's quite a bit more expensive ($99
for 250,000 pageviews on cloud.typography vs $49 for 500,000 on typekit) and
I'm wondering what extras it provides.

~~~
muglug
Hoefler & Frere-Jones typefaces.

Their typography foundry is held to be second-to-none among typeface quality
and frequency of usage in print and elsewhere.

In particular, their typeface Gotham is incredibly popular, and making it
available as a webfont publicly is a big deal.

Also, this effort has been underway for at least three years. Their attention
to detail ensures that these webfonts are going to be some of the best
available anywhere.

~~~
mortenjorck
An analogy might be that Typekit is the Netflix of typography, while H&FJ are
the HBO of the market. Gotham is Game of Thrones. And this move is the
typographic equivalent of making HBO Go available as a standalone
subscription.

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publicfig
Price wise, this is quite a bit less than I was expecting, especially
considering that you get 5 free with subscription. Now just to wait and see
how long it is before every site is using Gotham.

~~~
Anonymous238
I run a couple of sites that generate 2 million page views a day. Using their
prices, I'll be spending more on font subscriptions than the two dedicated
servers I'm running. It's a pass here. I'd gladly pay maybe $50/yr to get
permission to use their fonts, and a nice interface to preview, browse and
generate the fonts I'd like to include. However, if they think I'm going to
spend $700+ per month to include three or four webfonts on my site, they're
out of their mind. There are countless similar webfonts available for free,
and the difference in quality is not nearly worth the price to me, or my
users. I think they need a new approach and pricing structure.

~~~
publicfig
I'm curious, where are you seeing $700 a month at?! On pricing, the most
expensive option is $299 a YEAR.

~~~
Anonymous238
Click on _show larger plans_ , which go up to 20 million monthly page views at
$299/mo. I'd need roughly 60 million page views, so $900/mo, although they'd
probably cut a _wonderful_ deal at $700/mo.

The pricing is absurd. They think I'm going to shell out $10k/yr for using
their web fonts? Where's the value here? Where's the return on my investment?
If I'm spending $10k/yr on fonts, they better generate some additional revenue
on my end. Also, my users better be jumping out of their seats at how
impressive the difference is with and without their fonts. That's simply not
the case though. I'm not in the business of throwing money out the window, and
it could be better invested in countless other places.

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ics
Literally days after spending _another couple days_ searching for a Whitney
replacement for a site I'm working on and finally getting set up with Typekit.
Still, this is something the entire design community has been looking forward
to for a long time. I'll probably wait a while to give it a try for myself,
but I am very interested in seeing how their fonts look across the web as
others start to pick them up.

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jwarren
I love H&FJ fonts, but they're very vague about which typefaces you get access
to. If I knew what they were, I'd be highly likely to sign up.

~~~
superchink

      Join Cloud.typography and get your first five webfont packages FREE.
      Choose from among H&FJ’s complete library of type families, known for
      their plentiful styles and rich typographic features, each carefully engineered
      to be fully functional in the browser.
    

and

    
    
      Already purchased H&FJ fonts? Log in and start your subscription, and you’ll
      find all your fonts available to use with Cloud.typography at no additional cost.
      Buy fonts for your computer, and they’ll instantly appear in your
      Cloud.typography webfont library, too.
    

…seems to indicate that you pay for a base subscription (based on pageviews)
and they handle hosting/serving all the fonts that you've purchased. It's not
"all-you-can-eat".

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aclevername
Take this with a grain of salt since I can't find the source, but I vividly
remember a designer wanting to use a H&FJ typeface (Gotham) on a project I was
working on about a year and a half ago, only to have the H&FJ FAQ state that
they don't allow web embedding and aren't developing it for what amounted to
aesthetic reasons (i.e., web font technology was not far enough along for them
to feel comfortable with the display of their type on screen.)

Now, instead, they're using the same technology as just about everyone else,
under their own service, and just rehinted their typefaces to match the tech.

~~~
zeitg3ist
Actually the service itself launched as a private beta in early 2012 [1],
while on the H&JF FAQ there has been a "work in progress" statement since at
least 2011 [2].

[1] [http://kottke.org/12/03/kottkeorg-
redesign-2012-version](http://kottke.org/12/03/kottkeorg-
redesign-2012-version)

[2]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20110707053012/http://www.typogra...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110707053012/http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?path=head)

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huhtenberg
... and it doesn't work -
[http://i.imgur.com/fURqtTc.png](http://i.imgur.com/fURqtTc.png)

Presumably, because of blocked referrers.

Damn. I was so looking forward to using small-sized Whitney as a body font,
because it looks _amazing_.

~~~
ics
If you use typekit, give Prenton a try. I was also on the hunt for a Whitney-
as-body replacement and it's what I'm currently using. The proportions are
very nice (versus the gothics you'll often see as recommended) and they have a
condensed family if you need it. Freight Sans might work as well if you want
something a little more modern.

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IzzyMurad
There are just too many excellent free alternatives to justify such
subscription.

~~~
larrywright
There really aren't. H&FJ make some of the best typefaces out there.

~~~
Silhouette
_H &FJ make some of the best typefaces out there._

So do Adobe, and Ascender, and other professional foundries, and several of
their font families are available completely free.

Despite all the praise for H&FJ's quality from some posters here, I've got
Photoshop and a 400% zoom that says their screen fonts still have to fit on
the same limited number of pixels as everyone else's, and inevitably, the
pixels that get turned on are similar to other well-hinted fonts at small
sizes.

I've tried a few experiments, and I'm not seeing anything to suggest that H&FJ
have some magic new technology that means their fonts are going to render
better than everyone else's. Indeed, the quality of rendering in Firefox on
Windows 7 appears to be somewhat variable: even some of the fonts on the
linked page, such as the Whitney small caps used in headings, are far from
crisp. The Archer small caps if you click through the "Learn More" link also
seem to have obvious rendering/hinting problems at the top of many of the
glyphs (and don't look anything like the "Firefox Windows" screenshot they
show on their "Render Quality" page).

~~~
jrochkind1
Maybe, but i'm excited by [http://www.typography.com/cloud/the-
fonts/](http://www.typography.com/cloud/the-fonts/), where they mention that
all their fonts have: real small caps; old-style (text) figures; full range of
individually drawn (not interpolated) weights; ligatures; even some old-style
non-lining symbols like dollar signs.

If there are free web fonts that have all those, they are hard to find. (I
don't even know how to use old-style figures ordinarily, although I'm not an
expert in these things. But they imply that they have some custom (probably
hacky cause that's what it would take) solution to some special glyphs "Cloud-
typography includes tools for implementing advanced typographic features, and
delivering them even to browsers that aren't designed to support advanced
typography"; )

But yeah, clearly the market is people who care about things like in that
list. Some of which are _very_ rarely seen on the web right now; if this leads
to them being seen on the web more, it may increase the number of people who
know what a 'non-lining figure' is, and then increase the market of people who
want such things. And hopefully increase the number of free fonts that have em
too (although you can have all those features and still be a poorly-designed
font), as well as lead to actual standard ways to do things like text figures
on the web.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures)

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michaelpinto
I love Didot! My only wish in this department is that the type houses would
make it cheap to license fonts for mobile applications.

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tonetheman
I would rather pay once for type faces. I am sure if I was the content
producer I would feel differently.

