Fonts, Webfonts, Licensing and the WWW
Much has changed through the years since I was a young college student designing websites back at Ferris State University in the mid- to late nineties. Back then we generally built our websites in a non-wysiwyg HTML builder called PageMill, where all styling was done “inline”, or in the line of code it pertained too. Way before div’s, we used tables for our layout, <TR> and <TD> tags made up rows and columns of data in the tables, which were kind of visually rows and columns like in a Spreadsheet, or in the eponymous database Table, where Rows and Columns provide the structure of the data.
The Old Days: Inline styles. System Fonts. Tables for layout. Web "pages"
SVG graphics have taken the web by storm with their tiny file sizes and ability to be animated and scaled infinitely with no loss of sharpness or detail.
Fast forward 20 some-odd years and you have website builders inside full-featured Content Management Systems (CMS’s) like WordPress, Cascading Stylesheets being applied in layers to HTML 5 Components like divs, nav elements, sections, paragraphs and headlines with razor sharp accuracy. SVG graphics have taken the web by storm with their tiny file sizes and ability to be animated and scaled infinitely with no loss of sharpness or detail.
Today: Fonts on the Web
Fonts on the Web make up a huge part of this fast, sharp, rich media rich experience of the Modern Internet in the 2020’s. When in the past we were forced to make images of type, letters, words to ensure brand standards were met, today we can rest assured we are able to find the correct web-ready fonts for any application. This ensures our websites, apps, and rich web applications will be attractive, effective and performant.
1. System Fonts
2. Web Fonts
Arial, Times New Roman, (gulp…) Comic Sans, and usually Helvetica are the usual suspects when it comes to system fonts. These are client-side and are installed on your computer. These are specified in your code or style sheets and assumed to live on your physical computer, not a web server or the cloud, and are installed on your computer with the OS.
Google fonts and Adobe webfonts are good examples of these. The fonts in this category live on the cloud servers where they are installed. Although local copies of them can be made for desktop use or uploading to a webserver for @fontface referencing, thee only need to be pointed to from the stylesheet or website builder to be properly referenced.
3. Client-Side Fonts
System fonts are by their nature also client-side; they reside on the computer or device that the end-user views the site or application on.
3 Server-Side Fonts
Server-side fonts live on the webserver serving up the website or application, be it an old-school webserver on a server farm somewhere, or a virtual server cluster somewhere in the cloud.
Common Questions
- Do I need a font license for each website I have hosted on the same webserver, if they are unaffiliated with one another?
- What if they are all affiliates under one company?
- If I license webfonts for my site, am I allowed to used to corresponding desktop font on my own computer?
- What about team members, can they use the same desktop fonts?