back to article A font farewell to Fontdeck as website service closes

Fontdeck, a service which provided fonts to websites, is to close. Fonts can no longer be purchased, and existing fonts will no longer be served after 1 December 2016. Fontdeck was founded in 2009 by Jon Tan and Richard Rutter, and was a joint venture between two design companies, the Brighton-based ClearLeft and OmniTi in the …

  1. FF22

    The real reason..

    ...was probably more that the "buy once, serve forever" model didn't work out them for either. You just can't provide a perpetual free hosting for a one-time fee that's also low enough so people will buy your stuff you will serve in the first place.

    1. RockBurner

      Re: The real reason..

      It wasn't a one-time payment, it was an annual fee.

      I can see their arguement - the matrix of font 'behaviours' is only going to grow when you consider that each operating system / browser combination seems to render fonts differently, not to mention that each font and even each face within a font seems to be built with different configurations of baselines /character spacing, etc etc.

      I've always found their tech-support service to be excellent too.

  2. Alister
    Unhappy

    Cloud = Vapour

    Our Web team use Fontdeck quite a bit for custom fonts, so this is going to hit them hard.

    As with the reported shuttering of Adobe's Photo cloud, this does call into question why you would constrain your business to the point of reliance on a cloud based service, which may disappear at any time.

    Granted, Fontdeck have tried to do this in the least disruptive way, instead of abruptly disappearing without trace, but if no-one else provides an exact replica of a particular font they currently supply, then designers, developers and clients will all have to start again picking a replacement, which all costs time and money.

    So what incentive is there to use a cloud based service, given you could be left in the lurch at any time?

    1. DaLo

      Re: Cloud = Vapour

      "... if no-one else provides an exact replica of a particular font they currently supply, then designers, developers and clients will all have to start again picking a replacement ..."

      Couldn't they have offered to sell a perpetual licence to the font in question on a per website basis to all existing customers? It may not have the browser switching but would be better than reverting back to Times New Roman. The webmaster* could host locally then.

      *RE: Webmaster Is that word in use any more seems ages since I saw it written down and now i've used it twice.

  3. Mikel

    While the closure shows the risk of taking dependencies on externally served fonts anything...

    1. adnim
      Thumb Up

      Yup

      however, you are much more succinct... you replied while I typed. Serves me right for trying to be smart and using more words than what were necessary :-) Have an up!

  4. adnim

    A resourceful web developer

    Would not notice.

    Am I all alone in believing that a fast, responsive and reliable website is only realisable when all dependencies are on the same server/cluster? (OK, social media/YouTube etc aside).

    How can anyone using a third party service guarantee any kind of up time/latency/page loading times etc. to a client?

    Responding "My provider said it would,work/would be quick.", when a client asks "Why is this not working properly?" is laughable.

    1. Alister

      Re: A resourceful web developer

      How can anyone using a third party service guarantee any kind of up time/latency/page loading times etc. to a client?

      This, exactly.

      One of our sites was responding incredibly slowly some time back, and we traced the problem to the loading of custom fonts - not, as it happens from Fontdeck on that occasion, but a different supplier.

      The web team was getting flak from the client, and were a bit snotty about our servers when they passed it to the Sysadmin team, so we took great pleasure in telling them there was bugger all we could do about it, and gave them the support email of the font provider. :)

    2. Psycho Flump

      Re: A resourceful web developer

      I'd much rather be serving our corporate font (Myriad*) from our own server but the licensing is so strict it's only available via Typekit. I'd love to get rid of our reliance on this Adobe fronted piece of shit but in spite of pointing out that Myriad is not worth the trouble of relying on someone else's uptime.

      *Honestly, using Myriad is like changing something from ocean grey to military grey given the amount of sans-serif fonts that we could self host and mitigate the risk.

      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

        Re: A resourceful web developer / shades of grey

        Have an upvote - and a bowl of nice, hot Gazpacho soup...

  5. metooaswell

    Pedant alert

    I think you will find that Clearleft are based in Brighton and not Bristol.

  6. Mage Silver badge
    Flame

    I've noticed this stupidity

    An increasing number of websites obviously sacrificing privacy and reliability are using 3rd party sites for fonts. Particularly Google.

    THIS IS ABSOLUTELY MORONIC sacrifice of functionality and potentially privacy.

    Any one doing this for a web site is CLUELESS. I check 3rd party themes for Drupal and Wordpress etc for this stupidity.

    1. myhandler

      Re: I've noticed this stupidity

      Google insist there is no specific tracking on fonts and they also say it's safe to use them on the admin section of a CMS - though silly to use them there imo.

  7. Mark 85

    I wonder if they considered this?

    I'm surprised Fontdeck didn't offer to "sell" the fonts to their customers as a good-bye gesture wherein the customer could put the code for the font on their own server. It would solve some problems for customers and also give Fontdeck some cash.

  8. joed

    because we all need more fancy fonts

    Glad I can disable another mean of centralized tracking through script blocking. I have not seen any detrimental impact as plain fonts look good to me and nuances some businesses stress about can't even be seen with magnifying glass/side by side.

  9. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Open source?

    "Couldn't they have offered to sell a perpetual licence to the font in question on a per website basis to all existing customers?"

    I don't know if they could or not. I don't think they own the fonts, they are like a broker.

    I wonder if Fontdeck has considered open sourcing their software? If they are losing money this won't help... but if they are making enough to keep the site up, but not enough to do the development they feel they need, they may find that people love the site enough to (given source code to work on) add the functionality for them. The typical risk of doing this is someone duplicating your product -- but in this case, the web site is not the main product, the vast collection of licensable fonts is.

  10. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Escrow Agreement

    These are still around, but presumably the costs and hoops to go through to effectively insure against premature termination of service are simply too high.

  11. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Comic Sans killed Fontdeck.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Joke

      "Comic Sans killed Fontdeck."

      Again? You bastards!

    2. Sleep deprived
      Joke

      "Comic Sans killed Fontdeck."

      Actually, Comic Sans only shot the serif.

  12. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Adblocked anyway

    I don't know if it's crap font rendering by X11 or Firefox, but I've been squinting a lot less since I added a "*font*" filter to Adblock.

    It's AMAZING how many sites break when you uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts"

  13. FlossyThePig

    Font (Fount)?

    Can someone enlighten me as to when font usurped typeface.

    1. FF22

      Re: Font (Fount)?

      Typefaces and fonts are two different things. The latter are a unique, binary representations of the former, and thus for ex. are copyrightable. Typefaces on the other side are not, because they're just an abstract ideal (as existing only in form of thoughts) of how letters and symbols should look.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon