New web font service: Ascenderfonts.com

Screenshot of www.ascenderfonts.com

This year the web font will become omnipresent. It’s possible to convert the fonts yourself and incorporate it into your website with something like Fontsquirrel. But some fonts just need a bit more than just a conversion, since they can look bad in browsers, certainly on Windows. So it was time for me to test some font services, since you may expect that the people behind the web service at least check if a font renders correctly.

Lucky for me that Bill Davis of Ascenderfonts.com asked me to check out their new font service after reading my article on web font rendering. At that time Ascenderfont did not offer trial accounts, so I was happy to take the offer in order to be able to give the service a spin for free.

The Ascender Corporation

The website Ascenderfonts.com is not a company by itself. It is the webshop of the font foundry Ascender Corporation. The company creates fonts, extends glyphs and hinting and resells fonts, so the emerge of web fonts means another opportunity for them to sell their fonts.

The company is founded in 2004 by a few software developers and typographers. One of the founder, Steve Matteson, has worked on both Arial and Times New Roman for Windows 3.1. He also designed Convection which is the font for the Xbox360, Liberation which is used on many Linux distributions and Andale Mono, a mono spaced font that for long had been my favorite font for replacing that less readable Courier. Finally he also designed Droid, the font for Google’s Android platform.

Another founder of Ascender, Tom Rickner, has been involved with the design of fonts like Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. All fonts we’re familiar with.

Ascender Officially started their web font service in July 2009 but it wasn’t a real option for web developers back then, since they only offered EOT Lite. That automatically meant that the fonts were only visible in Internet Explorer.

Back then EOT Lite was proposed by Ascender to the W3C as a default standard for web fonts. But the W3C chose WOFF as a standard, so in the beginning of January they started to support TTF and WOFF as well. Now all major browsers except Safari on the iPhone are supported.

The service

The fact that the service is now cross-browser has not been promoted yet, so it’s still more or less under the radar. But that could change quickly. They already offer 200+ fonts (Typekit offered at time of writing 400+) but want to have between 500 and a 1000 web fonts within two years.

Getting such a large collection is harder than it seems. Many fonts are by default not suitable for the web. I did a little test recently to see how some popular professional fonts would look like in a browser. All of them did not render well in one or more font sizes. It’s not much better with free and shareware fonts: a study of Ascender concluded that almost 96% of all those fonts have some sort of trouble with rendering in the browser.

So there’s a whole world of fonts that need to be improved in order to be used on the web. It’s easy to see the need. Fonts are a major component of a corporate identity and fonts like Arial or Times New Roman are rarely part of the offline corporate identity. Every company wants to have their online identity in sync with the offline version so that means lots of potential work for Ascender. Making a print font fit for the web starting from 9 pixels and up is worth a few days of work.

The focus on good screen rendering is according to Bill Davis of the Ascender Company the main reason why a web developer should choose for their service. According to Bill some other advantages of their service would be that their service (in contrary to Typekit) works without Javascript and that the licensing is per font and per domain, which should be easy for billing, especially for larger companies.

What I missed when using the Ascenderfont service is a bit more information about the rendering. There are screenshots of Windows and the Mac and you can do a actual font rendering in your own browser, but it’s not as detailed as Typekit that show previews of fonts at different font sizes, of all the major browsers on each major operating system. Okay, maybe it’s a bit too much information, but it is comforting to know that you can check every option before choosing a particular font.

What I do like is that the web fonts are categorized between the ones that are fit for headings and the ones that are fit for body text. Typekit has that function too through tagging, but at the moment only a few fonts are tagged as either headline or text.

What about the font creators?

With all the web fonts popping up everywhere I was wondering how the font foundries themselves look at this new development. Well, the people of Ascender certainly don’t feel uncomfortable with it. Bill Davis of Ascender says that most of their clients fine with web fonts: “Almost all of our clients agreed with our proposal of EOT Lite (wb: similar to EOT, but without URL binding and proprietary compression) as a standard, so that’s a clear sign that font creators see web fonts as a viable way of using fonts in websites.”

Which service must I choose?

Although it’s interesting to compare web services with each other, it will be the font service with the most fonts that will probably win the battle for the clients. Designers want to have a broad choice of fonts to choose from. That is: if they even check if a font is available as a web font on forehand. Every web developer is sometimes confronted with designs created by someone who wanted to make something ‘challenging’ or just don’t know/care about technical limitations. In such a case it’s the service with the most fonts that could most likely offer font that’s in the delivered web design.