FontsLive Moving to Fonts.com!

FontsLive was launched in April, 2010 as a pioneering Web font service. One of its unique features is a hand-picked collection of premium fonts optimized for screen display. We are happy to report that all these fonts are now available at Fonts.com, a superior Web font service also from Monotype Imaging.

Therefore we have made the decision to migrate all our customers over to Fonts.com as their annual subscriptions come due. This will allow all FontsLive customers the same benefits as FontsLive, plus many more!

Fonts.com Web Fonts features a much broader selection of Web fonts (currently over 20,000 and growing). It is also a subscription-based service, with similar pricing tiers based on monthly pageviews.

But the most significant difference is that the Fonts.com Web font service license fee includes use of any of the fonts in the catalog. This includes some of the most important fonts for branding and publishing, including the Avenir®, Frutiger®, Univers®, ITC Officina® and Gill Sans® designs, as well as thousands more from the ITC®, Linotype® and Monotype® typeface collections. Yes, from hand-tuned text fonts to fabulous display and script fonts, Fonts.com has the most extensive selection and broadest language support of any Web font service.

We encourage you to set up a new Fonts.com Web Fonts account by visiting www.fonts.com. You will see three different pricing options, including a free plan to try the service at no charge.

In order to say “thanks” to all our loyal customers we are emailing every customer a special offer that can be used to create a new Web fonts account on Fonts.com, and migrate over to the Font.com Web font service.

We want to thank all our customers and followers who worked together with us to start the Web font revolution. And we look forward to working with all our customers to make the transition to Fonts.com as seamless as possible.

Sincerely,

The FontsLive and Fonts.com Web Fonts team

Modern furniture retailer, Room & Board improves site with web fonts

Room & Board® is a national retailer that provides handcrafted, American-made furniture. For over thirty years, the company has focused on the simple idea that good design should be beautiful, affordable and long lasting. Room & Board’s attention to detail can be seen in fine typography throughout its stores, in print and on its website.

The www.roomandboard.com website features the Gill Sans® regular and light fonts in menus, headlines and titles. Like many other websites it previously used images to control its typography. But thanks to web fonts this is quickly changing. The Room & Board web team is upgrading the site to switch from images to text by using web fonts. This change will enhance the site with better performance, accessibility and indexability. Using web fonts instead of images saves time and reduces the need to manually generate graphics using a program like Adobe® Photoshop®.

www.roomandboard.com

FontsLive web fonts now delivered to Blackberry 6 OS mobile devices

We are happy to report that we have enhanced the FontsLive web fonts service to support new Blackberry smartphones running Blackberry® 6 OS. These devices feature a new web browser (based on Webkit). This new browser includes support for web fonts using CSS @font-face.

Smartphones with the new Blackberry 6 OS include the BlackBerry Torch™ 9800 and Blackberry Style™ 9760. Some previous models can be upgraded: click here to see if your Blackberry can support an upgrade to Blackberry 6 OS.

With this new addition we now deliver webfonts to three different mobile platforms:

• Android™ OS 2.2+
• Blackberry 6 OS
• iOS® 4.1+ (iPhone®, iPad® and iPod® touch)

We will continue to add support for even more mobile browsers/platforms as they are upgraded to support downloadable web fonts.

Trends in Web Font Usage

We are continuing to see a wide variety of sites deploying web fonts. On our Web Fonts Gallery we are proud to showcase different customers using web fonts from FontsLive.

Websites large and small are recognizing the technical and aesthetic benefits of web fonts. The most visible impact of web fonts can be seen in headlines. Here web designers and developers are finding the flexibility of using real fonts with CSS @font-face. No longer constrained to using images or graphics to show words in desired typefaces, web developers are enhancing their sites in dramatic, exciting ways.

Here are some recent additions to the FontsLive.com web fonts gallery:


www.tablespoon.com - This recipe website is using the font Amasis™ in a striking manner for its white on black headlines and also in drop-down menus.


nsw.gov.au  – The NSW Government (New South Wales, Australia) has used the Lindsey™ regular & bold fonts in its headlines to invoke a vibrant personality to its site. It tastefully spices up its headings with a fresh, youthful energy.


www.cmsfx.com – CMS Forex specializes in trading software and services for the financial industry. It recently implemented the Rockwell® slab serif font into its sub-heads in a very colorful manner.

Introducing Web Fonts in Action

The Fonts Live team is excited to announce the release of our new web font preview tool, Web Fonts in Action! It’s been a long-time coming, but it’s finally here. Using some fancy programming behind the scenes (custom CSS, JavaScript and HTML manipulation), we let you see what your website looks like with web fonts.

With Web Fonts in Action you simply enter the URL of your choice, select a heading and body font from our extensive catalog and instantly see your website displayed in different fonts.

Web Fonts in Action has some exciting features created for us by the talented web development team at DevBridge. For example, we provide a visual preview of each font and filtering by style, language and foundry, make finding the right font easy. Because Web Fonts in Action works on all modern browsers, including Internet Explorer, you can see how your web fonts will render across multiple browser types. After you find the right font combination for your website, you can add them to your cart and checkout in just a few clicks. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

FontsLive.com announces enhanced web fonts support to Apple devices with iOS 4.2 software update

FontsLive delivers web fonts to any browser with web font support – whether on desktop or mobile devices. For the past six months we have delivered web fonts to Apple devices with the Safari mobile browser. This includes the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

This past week Apple released the iOS 4.2 software update. This update added support for web fonts in the TrueType format. Previously Apple devices only supported web fonts in the SVG format, which was problematic due to issues with font families containing multiple weights.

Apple devices with web fonts support

Today we updated the FontsLive web font service has to address these improvements in Apple iOS 4.2, and we encourage all users of Apple devices to download this new update.

We are committed to delivering web fonts to as many devices as possible. Android 2.2 supports web fonts, which FontsLive supports. We will continue to expand our service to other mobile devices as they embrace web fonts.

Read more info on FontsLive browser support

New web fonts: Baker Signet & Elephant now available

We are continuing to expand our web fonts catalog and are pleased to announce these new additions:

Baker Signet
Baker Signet was designed by well-known calligrapher Arthur Baker in 1965 for Visual Graphic Corporation (VGC). This version from Paratype includes both Latin and Cyrillic character sets.

Elephant & Elephant Italic
Elephant and Elephant italic were designed by Matthew Carter, one of the most-praised type designers of our time. They are a careful re-working of a traditional English extra-bold serif style and are great for eye-catching headlines.