Solving the Challenges of Asian Web Fonts by Bill Davis

Solving the Challenges ofAsian Web Fonts Bill Davis ATypI Hong Kong

Why use Web fonts?Establish typographic consistencyImprove user experienceEliminate graphics, improve workflowEnhance SEO, accessibility

Technology Adoption CurveWeb fonts in 10-15% of top 1000 websites Latin fonts

Alternative to Web fonts Use“System Fonts”

Global Typographic Consistency? Site using branding fonts and system fonts

Global Typographic Consistency?Sans serif fonts replaced with mincho and gothic styles

Web fonts are easy!You simply use CSS to define your fonts: {font-family: “MyCustom Font", "Hiragino Kaku Gothic", Osaka, "MS PGothic", Arial, sans-serif;}The fonts can be located:  Local  Downloaded  Linked to a Web font service

Leading Web font services Google.com/webfonts 554 font families Typekit.com 776 font families Fonts.com 2000 + font families WebInk.com 993 + font families FontDeck.com 992 font families Webtype.com 70 + font families Typotheque.com 55 font families

Primarily Latin-based fonts Google.com/webfonts Cyrillic, Khmer, Vietnamese “earlyaccess” Arabic, Indic, Korean + Typekit.com Cyrillic + Fonts.com Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Indic, Vietnamese, + WebInk.com Cyrillic, Vietnamese + FontDeck.com Arabic, Cyrillic + Webtype.com Greek, Cyrillic + Typotheque.com Arabic, Indic, Cyrillic +

Web fonts adoptionAsian fonts

Asian Web font servicesJapan: Korea: Typesquare.com (Morisawa) China: Fontplus.jp  justFont.com Dekomoji.jp amanaimages.com Mojidepa.com

So what’s the challenge?Site Design  Text-heavy websites  System fonts are tuned for small sizes  Web fonts benefit headlines  HTML5 – Flash replacement

Text size matters!Test your Web fonts!

So what’s the challenge?Asian font file sizes  Download times  File Compression/Subsetting techniques  Mobile users

More Smartphones than PCs

File download speeds2mb file 256kb DSL 1 minute 1 second 3Mbs (4G) 5 seconds5mb file 256kb DSL 2 minutes 33 seconds 3Mbs (4G) 12 seconds

File size matters!Test your Web fonts!

Asian font subsettingPre-subsetting or Dynamic subsetting  Build custom fonts for each web page  Smaller font files  Offered by Web font services

Multi-national companies are starting todeploy Web fonts

This is the year non-Latin andAsian Web fonts takes off!

Thank You! 謝謝 Bill Davis bill@fonts.comTypefaces used: Akko™ designed by Akira Kobayashi, 2011

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Solving the Challenges of Asian Web Fonts by Bill Davis

by Monotype_Imaging on Oct 30, 2012

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