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Solving the Challenges of
Asian Web FontsBill Davis
ATypI Hong Kong
Why use Web fonts?
Establish typographic consistencyImprove user experienceEliminate graphics, improve workflowEnhance SEO, accessibility
Technology Adoption Curve
Web 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 KakuGothic", 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 adoption
Asian fonts
Asian Web font services
Japan:
Typesquare.com (Morisawa)
Fontplus.jp
Dekomoji.jp
amanaimages.com
Mojidepa.com
Korea:
China:
justFont.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 speeds
2mb file 256kb DSL 1 minute 1 second
3Mbs (4G) 5 seconds
5mb file 256kb DSL 2 minutes 33 seconds
3Mbs (4G) 12 seconds
File size matters!
Test your Web fonts!
Asian font subsetting
Pre-subsetting or Dynamic subsetting Build custom fonts for each web page Smaller font files Offered by Web font services
Multi-national companies are
starting to deploy Web fonts
This is the yearnon-Latin and
Asian Web fontstakes off!
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