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A plain looking website is fine if it functions primarily as an information distribution platform. But if you really want your business or personal website to stand out and stay modern, few things work better and more intrinsically than an inventive and stylistic font.

The ability to successfully implement custom fonts has evolved over the years from a basic concept that didn’t really work to a seamless technology that can be added to any website.

Evolution of Online Fonts

In the late 90s, Internet Explorer began allowing custom fonts that were translated into the proprietary EOT format.  The problem was that it was insanely difficult to actually put a font into the EOT format because Microsoft’s EOT tool never worked and there were licensing headaches. Designers were basically taunted by an option that remained just out of reach.

That started to change in 2007 when Apple’s Safari web browser began to support custom web fonts using traditional TrueType and OpenType formats, but with a 2 percent market share, that still meant the Internet still looked pretty uniformly bland.

About five years ago sIFR came out, a font replacement technology that relies on Flash to generate custom fonts.  The next step was Cufon, which uses Javascript, but both technologies were slow to load and often a pain to work with.  With the performance problems and complexity involved, these two technologies didn’t budge the web very far from its uniform font beginnings.

In 2009 Firefox and Google’s Chrome browser finally decided to join the party and support TrueType and OpenType fonts – opening the doors to widespread font customization – but there are still lingering problems.

Licensing Speed Bumps

It’s been one year since 100 percent of the browsers finally achieved web font (aka @font-face) support, but there are still licensing problems.  While there are countless fonts made by an absurdly large number of font foundries, few of them are licensed for embedding.

Embedding fonts used to just mean distributing them in files like PDFs, but now it also means you can’t distribute and provide them to a website viewer.  The licensing agreements for the vast majority of the fonts out there were drafted when the web didn’t even exist.  So in the 80s and early 90s, only being able to use a font with the ultimate goal of printing on paper wasn’t a big deal.  However, as viewing content shifted from paper to the screen, this limitation proved to be a huge stumbling block for everyone in the creative industry.

So the progress on the font front over the past year has really been made in licensing. One of the biggest advances came when Adobe approved all of their licensed fonts for web use, giving designers everywhere a grab bag of font options to immediately begin using legally.

A website called Font Squirrel popped up shortly thereafter, offering an online conversion tool that lets you convert any font that you have a license for – or any royalty free font – into a format that Safari, Chrome and Firefox can use.

You can also export the font to a format that Internet Explorer can use, finally making good on the promise of the EOT format.

Typekit

The last piece of the puzzle is Typekit, which came out in September 2009.  Typekit went to all the big font foundries out there and worked out licensing deals with many of them – the first big push of commercial fonts online. In other words, Typekit led the charge in updating licensing agreements from a pre-web world to the modern world.

Not only did they handle all of the licensing issues, but they also hold all of the fonts on their servers all around the world and distribute them from their end.  So now designers have all these fonts to use and the licensing has been worked out. There are servers set up all over the world to distribute the fonts so the load time and performance are quick to the point where you finally don’t see delays or performance issues.

So now there really is no reason to stick with the same boring fonts website after website.  There are far too many options out there and everyone has the ability to create custom fonts, so the variety can be truly endless.

Over the weekend, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch finally responded, committing to improve performance, while Flash engineer Tinic Uro blogged about the improved performance of an upcoming version of Flash that addresses some of the myriad problems and drawbacks that inspired the “lazy” comment.

I think Jobs’s persistent trashing of Flash and refusal to allow it anywhere near Apple mobile products has finally hit home, but I don’t think there’s much Adobe can do about it.

Mobile Problems

I liked Flash in its earlier years as an accessory to the web. But as the web moves forward and becomes ever more mobile, Flash’s performance, cost, and proprietary nature creates a recipe for disaster as it nears ubiquity.

Open a Flash-heavy site on your laptop and you can literally watch the temperature shoot up to 180 degrees, the fans ramp up to maximum speed and your battery life plummet.

These responses rule out opening that site on your iPhone or iPad as it would quickly crash your device.  The future of the internet fits inside your pocket or in the bag across your shoulder, so as long as Flash remains as cumbersome as it is today it will necessarily get left behind.

Not Dead Yet

Flash still has some advantages.  Ninety percent of web development time is spent making sure the site is compatible with all versions of Internet Explorer, the most widely used web browser out there right now.

Since Flash looks the same on every site, except for mobile devices, it’s seen as a shortcut to instant compatibility.  But the overall drawbacks are beginning to drag down any site that relies too heavily on Flash to get by.

Other Options

We’re still years away from Flash’s demise, but in the meantime, I think there are a few different options out there right now that are faster, easier to work with and ultimately much better than Flash will ever be.

Flash is used for a lot of web interactivity, but things like jQuery are replacing that now.  Creating a site from scratch in good ol’ HTML and jQuery may require more work, but the site will load faster, run faster, use less power on laptops, look the same on mobile devices, and remain easier to maintain over the years. It also won’t cost you hundreds of dollars to get started.

YouTube has been the number one Flash user for years, but Youtube and Vimeo each recently launched HTML5 versions, giving that comparatively new video platform a serious foothold in the market.

As more developers see the advantages of ditching Flash, I think Adobe will have its hands full playing catch up to try to keep Flash viable, but I think we’ll see a Flash-free internet within 10 years… apart from Adobe’s home page.