Typography Grows Up

With @font-face now supported by all the major browsers, everyone wants to get in on a piece of the action. The web development community can’t wait for fonts that don’t rhyme with Lucida, type designers and foundries are ready to open a new market for their wares, and users couldn’t be more excited to get past the fuzzy letters and awkward hinting that have been the hallmark of web typography to date.

While commercial services like Typekit have enjoyed considerable success peddling rich typefaces, the emergence of high-quality, open source fonts like those provided by the Google font directory and the League of Moveable Type are a real indicator of healthy growth in the typographic moment and well worth a brief look. Font families like Friedrich Althausen’s Vollkorn and the League’s revival of Alternate Gothic No.1 are instant classics that render well across the stable of modern browsers; script typefaces like Toshi Omagari’s Tangerine add an exotic flare that Arial could never quite capture.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention the fabulous repository of 100% free fonts available over at Font Squirrel.