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Webfont Hosting Services
6:52Serving up webfonts to a site has become much easier and popular today with webfont hosting services. There are numerous avenues available, so we’ll look at how to use a few of the more popular ones.
Now let's look at the second model of web
font distribution,
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which involves hosted services to serve up
web fonts on a site.
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This means the font files are not actually
stored on your site,
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they live elsewhere with a hosted service.
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But your site has permission to serve them
up to users.
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This often operates through a subscription
base model like typekit or
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cloud typography.
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Other places like google fonts allow you
to do this for free.
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Let's take a look.
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Adobe typekit is one of the more popular
today buy.
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Paying a yearly subscription your able to
access thousands of fonts to choose and
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implement on your site.
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Depending on your subscription, you can
have an unlimited or
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limited number of fonts to serve up on a
site.
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Once you sign up, you'll be able to select
the fonts you want and
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then publish the kit on your site.
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This requires some painless copying and
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pasting of JavaScript from Typekit into
your site's HTML.
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You'll then be able to easily call the
font families through CSS on the site.
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What's also nice about this is the
flexibility.
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If you need to switch typefaces, all it
requires is updating your
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kit in CSS instead of having to purchase
another web file licence.
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Typekit has a trial subscription if you
want to test all of
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this out after the video.
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A free version of this hosting service
model is Google Fonts.
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Google Fonts library continues to grow.
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But free fonts can sometimes be limiting
due to issues with versatility,
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number of weights, and accent support.
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With Google Fonts, you simply browse the
site,
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find a type face you'd like to implement,
and add it to your collection.
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You can download your collection and
install the fonts on your computer.
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Which is again nice for mock ups and
design apps.
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Or you can serve up your collection
through Google Fonts API.
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To do this let's add open sans to our
collection and click use.
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Now we're presented with the family in
it's full array of weights and styles.
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Notice here how the numbers refer to each
of the weights.
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These are relevant to our CSS when using
the font weight property,
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as we can enter this number into the
field.
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Currently only normal is selected, so I
wanna at normal italic, bold, and
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bold italic for versatility.
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Over here we see our page load.
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We're still in the green so that's good.
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Next we can add extra characters if more
language support is needed.
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But remember that's going to affect your
page load because the file
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size will be bigger.
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Now Google gives us a code to add to the
head section of our
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site's html which will allow us to call
upon these fonts through our CSS.
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Two alternate options are also provided,
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if you wanna instead import the web font
ccss or through JavaScript.
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To test this out,
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I set up an example workspace with a
similar html setup to our last one.
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Let's use the standard method, and
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I'll add this snakebite of code right
above our main style sheet's link tag.
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Here's our workspace and
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I'll jump into our HTML and add it right
above our style sheet.
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If we head back to Google Fonts we see
that
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Google has provided us with the font
family call in our CSS.
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So I'll highlight that and add it to our
CSS in our body tag.
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I'll click save and hit save in our HTML.
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This HTML is set up in a similar way to
our last work space where the name of
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the fonts should be portraying the style
that they're showing.
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So lets go check that out.
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When I click view we're now able to see
open sands as a web font on our site.
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I'd say that's some fairly painless web
font calling.
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You can check out this work space for a
further look under the hood.
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Also, if we remove the Google font snippet
from our head,
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we could see what it looks like when it's
falling back to our regular sans typeface.
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I'll save that and refresh.
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It's falling back to our browser based
sans typeface, because our CSS specifies
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a sans typeface as a fallback font, if our
open sans typeface doesn't work.
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Like self hosting, pros and cons also come
with hosted services.
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The pros include access to a large number
of web fonts for an inexpensive price.
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Flexibility to change your web fonts on a
whim without buying more
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web font licenses.
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And the ability to easily implement web
fonts on your site.
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The cons deal with reliance on a third
party server which
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could potentially go down and affect your
typography.
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And although the selection is vast a
service might not
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have the exact type face you need.
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Because both self hosted web fonts and
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web font hosting services have distinct
pros and cons there's no one answer.
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It really depends on the budget and
project at hand as to what will work best.
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Lastly I want to cover what a backup plan
can look like if a hosted service is
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down and doesn't display your web fonts.
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Under the 5 family property in CSS, you
can set up a string of
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similar type faces that start with your
first web font choice.
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And then provide the next best system
alternatives.
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So currently we only have open sans, and
sans serf.
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If we were to stack multiple type faces
here for
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fall backs, this technique is called font
stacking.
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If one doesn't display, then it looks down
the road for
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the next one, and the next one down, and
so forth.
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For fall back fonts in your stack, you'll
want to consider typefaces that
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are native to operating systems like Mac
OS and
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Windows, and have a similar look and
metrics to your first typeface choice.
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Use your knowledge from the videos on how
to choose a typeface to
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select a good alternative.
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You can also check out cssfontstack.com.
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Which provide some helpful pre-made font
stacks.
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Let's head over there.
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Here, we're presented with different type
faces and if you
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copy to the clipboard you'll get the whole
stack of type faces that are similar.
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So, we'll go down to Helvetica because
Helvetica is pretty similar to Open Sans.
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So i'll go back to our CSS and we can
paste our stack in.
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I don't want to remove open sans.
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So i'm just going to paste it below it
just to see the stack that's going on, and
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I'll copy these type faces on, cut them
from there.
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And then paste them right there and i'll
remove this extra font family call.
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Great so this is a stack where open sans
will display first if
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it's correctly called from google fonts.
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Next will be Helvetica Neue, then
Helvetica, then Arial,
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then the Sans Serif for the browser.
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At the end of this stack, you can see that
we're calling a generic type family called
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Sans Serif, based on the genre.
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The terms you can use here are Serif,
Sans, Cursive, Fantasy, or Monospace.
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Although I really feel like you're taking
a gamble with Fantasy,
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because the generic font families are all
browser-dependent.
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From there your font stack should be good
to go.
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Just make sure to give it some good
testing.
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A properly built stack can help your
typography weather the storm amidst a web
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font outage.
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That's it for current models of web font
distribution and this stage.
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In the next stage, we'll look at the
basics of web typography.
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