Sorry Typekit, you’re unusable (for now)

With the launch of the new site I decided to try once again to give @font-face another try. I’ve been disappointed in the past with how most browsers render embedded fonts, including Firefox on both the Mac and PC. So when the Great and the Good in the web community began touting typekit as the answer we’ve all been pining for, I naturally needed to know. Being the good and the great disciple that I am.

So I got myself a free (hey, you got to try it first, right) typekit account and loaded up my font stack. Plugged in the requisite javascript, aligned the stylesheet code, and crossed my fingers as I refreshed the browser.

As expected, things looked great in Safari. (Ah Safari, how I adore thee). Unexpectedly, things looked like crape everywhere else. Firefox, IE8, IE7, IE6 (Ha HA! Gotcha, I didn’t really check IE6). The text was largely readable, but too many characters looked fuzzy, or had specks of lint stuck in the corners. Opera looked ok, but who uses it? I was confused (still am) as to what all the buzz about typekit was if it wouldn’t even render nicely in Firefox, and prompted me to question the true issue with @font-face.

Briefly, I wondered whether I could live with it. Slightly unreadable text vs some KICK ARSE design! Saying I pondered it briefly is a stretch. No design is worth poorly rendered text. So typekit was scraped and reverted to the fallback stack. And keeping the faith in the Holy and the Mighty became just a little harder.

Then a couple of days later, this article, ‘Opera loves my web font‘ showed up in my feedreader… Read part 2 of this post: FontSquirrel.com saves @font-face.