¶ The MyFonts January 2009 newsletter reports on their Top 10 Fonts of 2008. The list highlights the year’s most successful fonts in each genre, based on sales numbers.
Sitting pretty in that list (based on sales numbers, remember) is a free font family: Museo and Museo Sans, which were the year’s top geometric display fonts. Designer Jos Buivenga offers three out of the five Museo weights for free, along with 2 out of the 10 Museo Sans fonts, but on the strength of the paid weights alone, the Museo family still made it to the top of the list. Jos specifically allows use of the free weights for @font-face linking, but it’s clear this was no deterrent to people forking out hard cash for the full family. There’s a lesson there for the rest of the industry, methinks.
Museo is good for headings like this one
Museo is a clean yet unconventional semi-serif. With its sans-serif companion, both typefaces are lucid and versatile, great for original-looking headlines but also effective in medium-sized texts. If you have a suitable browser (Safari, Firefox 3.1, Opera 10) the prior heading should be have been rendered in Museo 500 through the magic of webfonts.
Comments
1
One problem I’ve got with a lot of font-makers is that I either can’t find the EULA before buying; or the EULA is confusing; or the EULA places restrictions that I can’t live with.
Please double-check me on this with regards to Museo: Downloaded for free, the license info on Buivenga’s site says:
bq. Using this font for a @font-face declaration is allowed, but only if a readable link to my homepage is put on every page where this font is used. This link may be the size of a regular copyright notice.
Now, I can’t live with this requirement. BUT, I AM willing to pay. Yet nowhere can I find what the restrictions may be if I pay for the whole shebang. (All weights.) Can I then skip the attribution? Or what? I don’t see this info anywhere handy.
I’ve run into this situation a lot. (My sole interest is in embedding with @font-face.) It’s a hell of thing to pay a considerable sum for a font and then find out I can’t embed it. I’ll be trying to contact Buivenga about this but I ask you, do you see the EULA for a paid scenario anywhere? Or am I just suffering from eye-fatigue.
(Is this another lesson that font-makers have to learn? Clarity of license?)
2
Cannot wait until this is a reality. You could argue that with Firefox and Safari’s market share, we can do this now (progressive enhancement and all that) but the implementation is still slow (that Museo headline is the second-last thing to load on this page so I’m without a heading until long after I’ve started reading the article).
Will it mean the return of Comic Sans and all manner of ‘amateur’ fonts as we saw with the early days of Flash? Or is it so obscure such that only typophiles will make use?
So now I’m wondering if there’s currently a resource for such @font-face fonts. Do you know of one?
Cheers,
Rob.
3
Robert Douglas: I heard about the League of Movable Type the other day. It seems to be a campaign/work in progress, but you might want to keep an eye on it.
4
Robert: I don’t think we will see the return of Comic Sans on websites as it is widely available on most systems, it can just be used in a font stack. I think most people can be trusted to use this without us worrying about illegible body copy.
5
Robert: while we’re waiting for more commercial fonts with a license friendly to @font-face, here’s a pretty page showing some current free fonts available for embedding:
http://opentype.info/demo/webfontdemo.html
{ryan}
6
I liked the article about the fonts, but couldn’t help but notice how busy you must be, seeing as this article was hit pretty heavily with spam. When will it ever end?
Thanks for your help on getting my own blog up and running with your great chapter in ‘Blog Design Solutions’. In fact your chapter and the first were the only ones worth reading in my opinion. I’m a total purist and what complete control and ownership of what I create, so no wordpress, expressionengine, or whatever else is out there for me. Thanks!
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