How to use TypeKit on your website
What is TypeKit?
Adobe’s TypeKit is a subscription font service. That means that rather than pay a huge one-off fee to buy the rights to use a particular fonts on your website, you simply pay a subscription fee and can access hundreds or even thousands of professional fonts to use on your site, 100% legally.
Who can use TypeKit?
There is no restriction on who can use TypeKit: it doesn’t matter what business sector you are in, or what type of organisation you are. It’s ideal for anyone wanting to create a professional website where the text helps convey both information and the right image for your organisation. It’s also ideal for people without advanced technical knowledge of how online typefaces work.
How do I use TypeKit?
Once you’ve signed up to a plan, all you need to do is visit your account page at the TypeKit site and type in the name and address of the site you want to use the fonts on. You’ll then get two lines of code, which you need to add to the header section of the HTML code for each page on your site. Once you’ve done this, you just select a font on the TypeKit site and it will automatically appear on your website. You can then change it again at any time.
How do I choose a font?
When you’re on the TypeKit site, you can search the font library by styles (such as serif or sans serif) and tags that describe the font, such as “distressed” or “headline”. You’ll then see an example of how each letter looks in the relevant fonts, including variations such as bold.
Does the whole page have to be in the same font?
No, you can assign different fonts (or variations of the same font) to the different tags that you’ve used on your page. For example, you could have the headers (such as the <h1> tag) in a bold version of the font and the body text in a lighter version of the font.
You can assign fonts to different HTML tags, classes or ids, giving you flexibility no matter how complicated your pages are. Any changes you make to the stylesheet on your pages will still remain valid so you can, for example, use a font from TypeKit but still control the line spacing.
How much does TypeKit cost?
It’s a little bit complicated as TypeKit offers three main plans: Personal ($24.99 a year), Portfolio ($49.99 a year) and Performance ($99.99 a year). Personal offers a choice 2,500 fonts, but limits you to two websites with a maximum five fonts per site, and a total of 50,000 page views a month.
Portfolio and Performance both offer a choice of 4,200 fonts and let you use as many fonts as you like, on as many websites as you like. The difference is that Portfolio is limited to a total of 500,000 page views a month, while Performance takes the limit up to a million page views a month. If you get more than a million page views a month, you’ll need to contact TypeKit to discuss its business range, which has considerably higher fees.
One neat option is that you can change your plan at any time. You can also get a 30 day free trial to start off.
Is TypeKit right for me?
We’d certainly recommend it: in fact iFactory uses TypeKit ourselves to create great looking sites that are in line with our clients’ brand style guides.
If you’re still unsure if it’s a good solution, just get in touch and we’ll talk you through the pros and cons – it’s all part of our plan to make iFactory the most helpful digital agency Brisbane has ever seen. Contact iFactory to create a compelling website design solution for you.
