Episode 23 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Kevin Yank (@sentience) has a one-on-one chat with Jeff Veen (@veen), one of the bright minds behind Typekit. A complete transcript of the interview is provided below.
SitePoint Podcast的 第23集现已发布！ 本周，凯文·扬克( @sentience )有一个一对一的杰夫·维恩(聊天@veen )，后面的亮心中的一个Typekit 。 下面提供了采访的完整笔录。
You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
您也可以将本集下载为独立的MP3文件。 这是链接：
SitePoint Podcast #23: Web Fonts with Jeff Veen (MP3, 23.6MB)
SitePoint播客＃23：Jeff Veen的Web字体 (MP3，23.6MB)
Kevin: The SitePoint Podcast episode 23, for Friday, August 14th, 2009: “Web Fonts with Jeff Veen”.
凯文： SitePoint播客第23集，2009年8月14日，星期五：“杰夫·维恩(Jeff Veen)的网络字体”。
Kevin: Hi, there and welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast—news, opinion, and fresh thinking for web developers and designers. I’m your host, Kevin Yank coming to you from SitePoint headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and I’m joined by my panel of co-hosts.
凯文：您好，欢迎回到SitePoint播客-有关Web开发人员和设计师的新闻，意见和新思路。 我是您的房东，凯文·扬克(Kevin Yank)从澳大利亚墨尔本的SitePoint总部来找您，我的共同主持人小组也加入了我的行列。
Brad: Brad Williams from WebDevStudios.
布拉德： WebDevStudios的布拉德 ·威廉姆斯。
Patrick: Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network.
帕特里克： iFroggy网络的Patrick O'Keefe。
Stephan: And Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas.
斯蒂芬：还有来自德克萨斯州休斯顿的斯蒂芬·塞格雷夫斯。
Kevin: It’s Friday, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for the SitePoint Podcast. It’s just me again this week—or, rather, it’s just me and our special guest—because this show is an interview with Jeff Veen, one of the bright minds behind Typekit, a new service that Jeff sometimes describes as “an iTunes Store for web fonts”. But rather than me explaining it, let’s welcome the man himself: Jeff Veen, welcome to the SitePoint Podcast.
凯文：今天是星期五，那只能意味着一件事：现在是时候进行SitePoint播客了。 本周只是我还是我和我们的特别嘉宾，因为这个节目是对Jeff Veen的一次采访，Jeff Veen是Typekit背后的聪明人之一，这项新服务被Jeff有时称为“ iTunes Store for网络字体”。 但是，除了让我解释这件事之外，让我们欢迎他自己：杰夫·维恩(Jeff Veen)，欢迎来到SitePoint播客。
Jeff: Hey, thanks so much, Kevin. It’s good to be here.
杰夫：嗨，非常感谢凯文。 很高兴来到这里。
Kevin: Good to hear from you. So, please, for our listeners, introduce yourself.
凯文：很高兴收到您的来信。 因此，请为我们的听众介绍一下自己。
Jeff: Sure, I’m happy to. Hello everybody, my name is Jeff Veen and I am the CEO of Small Batch, Inc., a company that is currently building a product called Typekit, which I think we’ll have quite a bit to talk about today.
杰夫：当然，我很高兴。 大家好，我叫Jeff Veen，我是Small Batch，Inc.的首席执行官，该公司目前正在开发一种名为Typekit的产品，我认为今天我们要讨论的话题很多。
Before that, I spent a little bit of time at Google, where we did a bunch of design work around Google Analytics, which I’m sure many of your listeners are probably familiar with. We got to Google through an acquisition of a product called Measure Map which I built at a company called Adaptive Path, which is a consulting company that focus on web design and user experience here in San Francisco.
在那之前，我花了一些时间在Google那里，我们围绕Google Analytics(分析)做了很多设计工作，我敢肯定您的许多听众可能对此很熟悉。 我们通过收购Measure Map产品进入Google，该产品是我在一家名为Adaptive Path的公司生产的，该公司是一家咨询公司，致力于旧金山的网页设计和用户体验。
So that’s, in a nutshell, what I have been up to for the past few years and I’m looking forward to chatting about stuff.
简而言之，这就是我过去几年一直在做的事情，我期待与您聊天。
Kevin: Alright. When someone meets you at a party, how is it you describe what you do? What’s the common thread?
凯文：好吧。 当某人在聚会上遇见您时，您如何形容自己的工作？ 什么是通用线程？
Jeff: You know, it depends a lot on the party. Honestly, I tell people that I make stuff on the Web and that it is primary the ultimate design perspective. Well, I really don’t have any training in design; technically, I kind of fell into it. I got to the web with a journalism background early on when I was at Wired magazine, but my career has kind of moved more and more towards building things on the Web from a kind of a entrepreneurial point of view now but I’ve kind of worked for myself and built companies with a lot of fantastic friends and partners over the last few years and by that point, they’re asking me if they could get me another drink and they walk away.
杰夫：你知道，这在很大程度上取决于聚会。 老实说，我告诉人们我在网上制作东西，这是最终设计观点的基础。 好吧，我真的没有任何设计方面的培训。 从技术上讲，我有点喜欢。 早在《 连线》杂志时，我就以新闻业背景进入网络，但是我的职业生涯已经越来越多地从一种企业家的角度转向在Web上构建事物，但是我有点在过去的几年中，我为自己工作，并与许多出色的朋友和合作伙伴建立了公司，到那时，他们问我是否可以再给我再喝一杯，他们就走了。
Kevin: Maybe it’s from your background at Adaptive Path more than anything, but it seems like you approach things from a usability perspective, or at least that seems to be whenever a new project from Jeff Veen comes out, there always seems to be more attention than average spent on the usability of the thing. What is it about the web that keeps you coming back with new ideas? Is it because usability is different on the Web than elsewhere?
凯文：也许这比您在Adaptive Path的背景要重要得多，但似乎您是从可用性的角度来解决问题的，或者至少是每当杰夫·维恩(Jeff Veen)的一个新项目问世时，总会受到更多关注比平均花费在事物的可用性上。 网络让您不断提出新想法是什么？ 是因为Web上的可用性不同于其他地方？
Jeff: One of things throughout my career that I’ve always been totally fascinated with is the blurring of the lines between people who make things and people who consume things on the Web. Like with television or even journalism, when I was working at newspapers, there was very much of this kind of small group of people, highly trained that they were responsible for making everything and that’s just totally went out the window when the Web came, right? And so I’ve always been super interested in things like social media, going all the way back to blogging where anybody can have a voice and anybody can publish and have an audience and share things, and I’ve always really been interested in that, and from that perspective, that gives us the requirement to have a lot of empathy in the design work we do, that we really focus on end users and to engage them and to make them part of the process because we’re also end users and they’re also developers, they’re also content providers. So that blurry line has always been really the driving force between all of the design work that we’ve done with all of the projects that I’ve been on.
杰夫(Jeff)：在我的职业生涯中，我一直着迷的一件事是，在网上做事的人和在网上消费东西的人之间的界限越来越模糊。 就像在电视甚至新闻业一样，当我在报纸上工作时，这类人群非常之多，他们受过良好的训练，他们负责制作一切，而当网络出现时，这一切就完全消失了，对吧。 ？ 因此，我一直对社交媒体这样的东西非常感兴趣，一直回到博客，任何人都可以发表意见，任何人都可以发布并吸引观众并分享东西，而我一直对此真的很感兴趣。 ，从这个角度来看，这就要求我们在设计工作中要有很多同理心，因为我们也是最终用户，所以我们必须真正专注于最终用户并使他们参与进来并使他们成为流程的一部分他们也是开发人员，他们还是内容提供商。 因此，模糊的界线实际上一直是我们对我所从事的所有项目所做的所有设计工作之间的驱动力。
Kevin: Great. So you mentioned your time at Google. As an ex-Googler— Alex Walker, our designer here at SitePoint was asking me if I thought you would have any perspective to share on Google Wave. Is that something you can talk about, is it something that you have a personal perspective on, were you involved in it at all?
凯文：太好了。 所以您提到了您在Google的时间。 作为前Google员工Alex Walker，我们SitePoint的设计师在问我，是否认为您对Google Wave可以有什么看法。 您可以谈谈这件事吗，您是否有个人看法，您是否参与其中？
Jeff: Actually, no. I wasn’t involved in that and to be honest, it was a rare example of Google being so secretive that when I saw the demo online so did everybody else, like it was all at the same time. I knew that there was a big project happening in the Sydney office and that it was, people were moving to Sydney to go work on it and nobody was talking about it. I think it’s fascinating like now, outside of Google and looking in, it is a great example of kind of how this bottom-up initiative that’s always worked at Google. There was always this mythology of the 20% time and talented engineers could go work on whatever they want and get support for it, and I think Google was an excellent example of that coming to fruition. There is a proven group of engineers that had a good idea and they got support for it internally and they ran with it, and they’ve done an amazing job.
杰夫：其实不。 我并没有参与其中，老实说，这是Google如此秘密的一个罕见例子，当我在网上观看演示时，其他人也一样，就像在同一时间一样。 我知道悉尼办公室正在发生一个大项目，那是，人们正搬到悉尼去工作，而没人在谈论它。 我认为，像现在这样令人着迷，在Google之外并向内看，这是这种自下而上的计划如何一直在Google运作的一个很好的例子。 20％的时间总是存在这种神话，有才华的工程师可以按自己的意愿去工作并获得支持，我认为Google是一个成功的典范。 有一个经过验证的工程师团队，他们有一个好主意，他们在内部获得了支持，并且与之合作，并且他们做的很棒。
Kevin: From a usability standpoint, what Alex is wondering at the moment is, is it practical, or even desirable, to weave together all of these much simpler systems of communication into one big solution? Is that something that has value bringing all of that together into something that may be more complex and difficult to use?
凯文：从可用性的角度来看，亚历克斯目前想知道的是，将所有这些更简单的通信系统整合为一个大解决方案是否可行，甚至是理想的选择？ 那是有价值的东西，将所有这些都整合在一起，可能变得更加复杂且难以使用吗？
Jeff: Well, that’s a totally valid concern, right? And I think if I were to sort of put money on any Google solution, they would do that in a way that is open and embracing of a developer community, I think very similar to sort of the position that Twitter has taken where—to be perfectly honest, I use Twitter all day long every day, and I kind of hardly ever visit their website. There’s clients, there is my phone, right… and I totally expect Google Wave to be the first implementation of perhaps a new way of connecting and communicating with people, just like Twitter has been. And we don’t what the rules are going to be for that, and we don’t know if people are going to end up doing all of that stuff. Just like email was 20 years ago, it moved out of proprietary solutions and into something that you can consume however you wanted. So that would be my guess, my bet.
杰夫：好吧，这是一个完全正确的担忧，对吧？ 而且我认为，如果我想花钱在任何Google解决方案上，他们会以开放的态度欢迎开发人员社区，这与Twitter所处的位置非常相似-说实话，我每天都整天使用Twitter，而且几乎没有访问过他们的网站。 有客户，有我的手机，对…………我完全希望Google Wave像Twitter一样，成为实现与人们联系和交流的新方式的第一个实现。 而且我们不知道规则是什么，也不知道人们是否最终会做所有这些事情。 就像20年前的电子邮件一样，它已从专有解决方案转移到您可以随意使用的内容中。 我敢打赌，这就是我的猜测。
Kevin: Fingers crossed.
凯文：手指交叉。
Jeff: Yeah, exactly.
杰夫：好的。
Kevin: Well, quite a few years ago now, you wrote a book called The Art and Science of Web Design and a SitePoint forum user, Alex Dawson wants to know if you had to think about it, what are the most important changes that have come to web design since that book was published?
凯文：好吧，大约几年前，您写了一本名为《网页设计的艺术与科学》和SitePoint论坛用户的书， 亚历克斯·道森 ( Alex Dawson)想知道您是否必须考虑一下，最重要的变化是什么？自从那本书出版以来就进入网页设计？
Jeff: That’s a great question. That was a long time ago too; I think it was 1999 when that book actually came out. So a tremendous amount had happened. If you think back to the year 2000, things like standard space web design was kind of a fringe thing, like big companies weren’t really embracing that and supporting that and it’s through the work of people like Zeldman and Eric Meyer and frankly, hundreds of designers out there really focused on standards-based design, as well as the sort of reemergence of the browser wars, right—has kind of converged on the fact that we kind of can take that for granted now. Like that’s not a big battle that we’ve got and fight, it’s a good design practice, and people do it all the time. Especially now that things like Firefox and Safari have really sort of taken a ton of market share away from the dominant players. I think that’s one of the biggest changes.
杰夫：这是一个很好的问题。 那也是很久以前了； 我认为那是1999年那本书真正问世的时候。 因此发生了很多事。 如果回想一下2000年，诸如标准空间网页设计之类的事情就只是一种边缘事物，就像大公司并没有真正接受和支持那样，这是通过Zeldman和Eric Meyer等人的工作，坦白地说，那里的设计师真的专注于基于标准的设计，以及浏览器之战的再度出现，对，这已经汇聚在一个事实上，即我们现在可以认为这是理所当然的。 就像那不是我们要打的大仗，这是一个好的设计实践，人们一直在这样做。 尤其是现在，诸如Firefox和Safari之类的东西确实已经从主导者手中夺走了大量的市场份额。 我认为这是最大的变化之一。
Actually, another really big change that happened in that time is the adoption curve of new browsers, and I think that’s something we don’t talk too much about these days. I know when I started my career in web design, when a new feature would land in a browser, we were all excited to use it but we knew it would be six, nine months, maybe over a year before we could really count on a big enough audience finally upgrading their browsers enough to being able to rely on those new features. Seeing things, for example with the @font-face font linking where a new browser comes out and within a matter of weeks, a huge proportion of the audience has upgraded Firefox or upgraded Safari. With Firefox, it simply asks you one time when you open the application, “Hey, do you mind if I do an update?” And it has already downloaded it and it swaps it out, you’ve got the new version, and that has fundamentally changed how quickly designers can embrace new technologies and frankly, how quickly the browser vendors could iterate and see what works.
实际上，当时发生的另一个非常大的变化是新浏览器的采用曲线，我认为这几天我们对此不多谈论。 我知道当我开始从事网页设计的职业时，当一个新功能会出现在浏览器中时，我们都为使用它感到兴奋，但是我们知道这将是六，九个月，也许是一年之后，我们才真正可以依靠一个足够多的受众最终升级了他们的浏览器，以能够依靠这些新功能。 看到的东西，例如通过@font-face字体链接出现了新的浏览器，并且在短短几周之内，很大比例的观众升级了Firefox或Safari。 使用Firefox，它仅在打开应用程序时询问您一次，“嘿，介意我进行更新吗？” 它已经下载了它并交换了出来，您已经有了新版本，从根本上改变了设计师采用新技术的速度，坦率地说，浏览器供应商迭代和查看有效方法的速度。
Kevin: Some of that has to do with browser makers being smarter about how they introduce features, the thing of putting a proprietary prefix on CSS property names, not to get too technical but it means the way new features are being added to browsers frees up developers to try these things out without necessarily breaking compatibility going forward or going backward.
凯文(Kevin)：这与浏览器制造商在引入功能方面更加机灵有关，这是在CSS属性名称上加上专有前缀，而不是太技术化，但这意味着向浏览器添加新功能的方式可以释放出来开发人员可以尝试这些东西，而不必破坏兼容性。
Jeff: That’s exactly right and designers can then provide feedbacks and frankly, vote with their code, right? You can see what kind of stuff is working.
杰夫：完全正确，设计师可以提供反馈，并且坦率地说，对他们的代码投票，对吗？ 您可以看到什么样的东西正在工作。
I’ve been watching really closely, in the WebKit nightlies, as we do these amazing CSS animations stuff, and it’s entirely built on top the core operating system technology so it’s highly performant, and it makes me super excited for what we’re going to be able to build probably some time in 2010—early 2010 if we get some consensus. I just think that’s an absolutely fascinating way of really showing a lot of innovation in the browser space, which to be honest, if you had asked me 10 ears ago, I would have said, “No, like I think that’s mostly sorted out now, you know and like, I think IE6 may be the last version we see…” remember all that stuff? I couldn’t be happier that these things are coming so quickly now.
在WebKit夜间活动中 ，我一直在认真观察，因为我们在处理这些令人惊叹CSS动画，并且它完全基于核心操作系统技术构建，因此它具有高性能，这使我对我们的发展感到非常兴奋以便能够在2010年建立一些时间-如果我们达成共识，则可以在2010年初建立。 我只是认为这是在浏览器领域中真正展示出很多创新的绝对迷人的方式，老实说，如果您10年前问我，我会说：“不，就像我认为现在大多数已经解决了，您知道并且喜欢，我认为IE6可能是我们看到的最后一个版本……”还记得所有这些内容吗？ 这些事情现在来得这么快，我感到很高兴。
Kevin: Well, you mentioned the reemergence of the browser wars and that’s true, but it really is a different kind of “war.” The first time around, there was a sense that someone had to win and we were all hedging our bets over who would win but now we’re quite happy if no one wins because the more competition is going on, the better the benefits for us.
凯文：嗯，您提到了浏览器大战的再次出现，这是事实，但这确实是另一种“大战”。 第一次，有人觉得必须赢，我们都在押注谁会赢，但是现在我们很高兴没有人赢，因为竞争越激烈，对我们的好处就越好。
Jeff: That’s exactly right. I totally agree. It’s more like we have the browser UN, right, where we have—actually the process is working now and we get how it goes and everybody’s getting along and…
杰夫：完全正确。 我完全同意。 这更像是我们在正确的位置拥有联合国浏览器-实际上，该流程现在正在运行，我们了解它的运行方式，并且每个人都相处融洽……
Kevin: So you mentioned @font-face and that is really the big new feature that led to Typekit so for those who may not know, what is Typekit?
凯文：所以你提到了@font-face ，这确实是导致Typekit的重要新功能，所以对于那些可能不知道的人来说，Typekit是什么？
Jeff: Typekit is an application that I’m building that sort of sits in between all of the different people that are interested in using typography on the Web. About 18 months ago, there was a post on A List Apart, Jeffrey Zeldman’s fantastic web developer website by Håkon Lie who is the Chief Technology Officer for Opera saying the next big thing is going to be web fonts and he had committed Opera to supporting it in the next version. Immediately after that, it started showing up in Safari and then Firefox announced that they would support it as well. It is a very simple way for designers to use, in their style sheets, a URL that points to a font on a server and their HTML then just renders using that font. So it is very similar to how we might, say, link to an image, or link to a bit of JavaScript. Now we can link to a font and when an HTML page renders in a browser, it will display in that font without having to use Flash or images or anything else. So really, the whole of typography can be opened up into browsers.
Jeff： Typekit是我正在构建的一种应用程序，它位于对使用Web排版感兴趣的所有不同人员之间。 大约18个月以前，有一个帖子列表除了 ，杰弗里·策尔德曼的梦幻般的网页开发者网站由哈康烈谁是首席技术官歌剧院说下一件大事将是网页字体 ，他犯了歌剧支持它在下一版本中。 此后，它开始出现在Safari中，然后Firefox宣布他们也将支持它。 对于设计人员来说，这是一种非常简单的方法，可以在样式表中使用指向服务器上字体的URL，然后HTML便使用该字体进行呈现。 因此，这非常类似于我们链接到图像或链接到一些JavaScript的方式。 现在，我们可以链接到一种字体，当HTML页面在浏览器中呈现时，它将以该字体显示，而无需使用Flash或图像或其他任何东西。 因此，确实可以将整个排版打开到浏览器中。
Now, this is something that’s been supported in Internet Explorer all the way back to, I think Internet Explorer 4, but certainly Internet Explorer 5, but it has been around for a while but Internet Explorer had done it in a very proprietary way using a font format that they had invented and they had patented and the only way to really use it in Internet Explorer was use a relatively bugging tool that was supposed to convert your font into their special format and link it up to the page and it really didn’t fit into how the designers work and so nobody really used it. Now these browsers were suggesting, “Well, why don’t we just use OpenType or TrueType fonts, which exists all over the world, like we have these forever, put them on your server, link them up and it just works and there’s been a tremendous amount of excitement about this. Designers are like, “This is fantastic! This is what we wanted for a long time, this is great.”
现在，这是Internet Explorer一直支持的功能，我认为Internet Explorer 4，但肯定是Internet Explorer 5，但是已经存在了一段时间，但是Internet Explorer使用一种非常专有的方式使用他们发明并获得了专利的字体格式，并且在Internet Explorer中真正使用它的唯一方法是使用一个相对较臭的工具，该工具应该将您的字体转换为特殊格式并将其链接到页面上，但实际上并没有。不能适应设计师的工作方式，因此没人真正使用它。 现在这些浏览器建议：“好吧，为什么我们不使用OpenType或TrueType字体呢？就像我们永远拥有的那样，这种字体遍布世界，将它们放在您的服务器上，将它们链接起来就可以了，并且对此非常兴奋。 设计师就像，“太棒了！ 这是我们长期以来想要的，这很棒。”
The sort of place where we have to slowdown and take stock of what’s happening, of course, is on the type designer and foundry side because they don’t have licenses that actually allow you to stick fonts on servers and distribute them all over the web. They are cautious and concerned about the fact that all of their intellectual property is just going to sort of become free and become widely distributed and be everywhere. So, they’re trying to find a solution that helps protect some their intellectual property.
当然，我们必须放慢脚步并评估正在发生的事情的地方是在类型设计者和代工方面，因为它们实际上没有允许您在服务器上粘贴字体并将其分布在整个网络上的许可证。 。 他们非常谨慎，并担心他们的所有知识产权都将变得自由，变得广泛分布并且无处不在。 因此，他们正在尝试寻找一种解决方案，以帮助保护其某些知识产权。
We have seen through the last decade that clearly DRM solutions don’t work, right? Almost every solution that’s been tried, whether it was iTunes or some of Microsoft’s technologies or whatever, those companies have always backed off. The consumer is just not tolerating all the arcane rules and things like that. So that kind of stuff is not going to work.
在过去的十年中，我们已经看到DRM解决方案显然行不通，对吗？ 几乎所有尝试过的解决方案，无论是iTunes还是Microsoft的某些技术，无论是哪种技术，这些公司都总是退缩。 消费者只是不能容忍所有不可思议的规则和类似的事情。 这样的东西是行不通的。
So what Typekit is trying to do is to find a middle ground in between designers who are desperately been trying to get fonts onto their web pages and foundries cautiously trying to enter this new market and our solution is to host fonts on a centralized server, put a series of relevantly lightweight protections in place so that the only authorized sites, only people with a Typekit account can actually use those fonts and then we give you a link that you put into your pages that makes the font work and you can continue to work the way you always have. Whether you use an HTML editing tool or write the code by hand, the idea is to let designers just create their pages but the fonts are available to them.
因此，Typekit试图做的是在渴望将字体放入其网页上的设计师与铸造厂谨慎地试图进入这一新市场的设计师之间找到中间立场，我们的解决方案是将字体托管在集中式服务器上，一系列相关的轻量级保护措施，以便只有授权的站点，只有拥有Typekit帐户的人员才能实际使用这些字体，然后我们为您提供一个链接，您可以在其页面上放置该链接，以使字体起作用，并且可以继续起作用您一直拥有的方式。 无论您使用HTML编辑工具还是手工编写代码，其想法都是让设计师仅创建他们的页面，但字体可供他们使用。
So in a nutshell, that’s how it all works.
简而言之，这就是全部的工作方式。
Kevin: So what attracted you to this project?
凯文：那么，什么吸引了您参与这个项目？
Jeff: Well, I had been thinking about what would come next when I was in Google. I left Google over a year ago now and started this new company called Small Batch with my long time friend and business partner, Bryan Mason. He and I had worked together at Adaptive Path. He ran the business of Adaptive Path, a consulting company, and he was looking for a new thing to do, and so he and I got together and started brainstorming a bunch of stuff that we could do. We did a conference, we did some work with Twitter, doing some consulting with them. We got together with a couple of other co-founders who had also been working with us at Google and had helped build Measure Map, Greg Veen and Ryan Carver. The four of us got together as we were doing this work at Twitter and said what could we do next? What would be our project? What would be something would really compelling to us?
杰夫：好吧，我一直在考虑我在Google时接下来会发生什么。 一年多以前，我离开了Google，与我的长期朋友和商业伙伴Bryan Mason共同创立了一家名为Small Batch的新公司。 我和他曾在Adaptive Path合作。 他经营一家咨询公司Adaptive Path的业务，并且他正在寻找新的工作，因此他和我聚在一起，开始集思广益，探讨一堆我们可以做的事情。 我们举行了一次会议，我们与Twitter进行了一些合作，并与他们进行了一些咨询。 我们与其他一些联合创始人在一起，他们也在Google一起与我们合作，并帮助建立了Measure Map，Greg Veen和Ryan Carver。 当我们在Twitter上进行这项工作时，我们四个人聚在一起，并说下一步该怎么做？ 我们的项目是什么？ 真正令我们着迷的是什么？
And this is right about the holidays of last year, and just before that, there had been a few blog posts. I think Richard Rutter from Clearleft, and John Allsopp from Australia, from Sydney, Western Civ, and the Web Directions conferences, had started talking about, “Hey what about bringing fonts to the Web now that the browsers are supporting them, maybe there’s some new business models there?”
这恰好是去年的假期，在此之前，已经有一些博客文章。 我认为来自Clearleft的 Richard Rutter和来自澳大利亚的John John Allsopp(来自悉尼， Western Civ和Web Directions会议)已经开始谈论，“嘿，既然浏览器正在支持字体，那么将字体带到Web上呢？有新的商业模式吗？”
Kevin: Yeah, it was just heating up around then.
凯文：是的，那时才刚刚升温。
Jeff: Yeah, just heating up around then. I also—serendipitously—went to Australia and spent the Christmas holidays in Sydney and got together with John and had lunch with him, where we started talking and he started telling me about this, like there could be an idea here. There could we do something around trying to provide maybe fonts as a service, maybe like how iTunes is a service, maybe fonts could have sort of an iTunes for fonts. And it totally resonated. That’s an audience— The web developer audience, since my days at Webmonkey back in the 90s writing, that’s an audience that I’ve been connected with and felt part of and had met at conferences and I was like this is a perfect audience, the perfect set of technologies, it feels like a bit of a wild west land grab. Like, here this new technology comes out, nobody knows what to do and there’s a ton of excitement about it, it’s perfect.
杰夫：是的，然后就变热了。 我也偶然地去了澳大利亚，在悉尼度过圣诞节，与约翰在一起，共进午餐，在那儿我们开始交谈，他开始告诉我这件事，就像这里可能有一个主意。 我们可以采取一些措施来尝试提供字体作为服务，也许就像iTunes是一种服务一样，也许字体可能具有某种iTunes的字体。 它完全引起了共鸣。 那是听众-Web开发人员听众，自从90年代我在Webmonkey时代起，我就与之建立了联系，并成为会议的一部分，并且在会议上相遇，因此我觉得这是一个完美的听众，一套完美的技术，感觉就像是在狂野的西部争夺土地。 就像，这项新技术问世了，没人知道该怎么做，对此充满了兴奋，这是完美的。
So we came back and we talked to John some more, he’s an advisor for Typekit, so we talk to him sort of all the time about it. We sketched out the basic sort of architecture, how could it work, dug in to how the browser supported everything, went out and talked to investors and said we think this is going to be pretty big is, that it’s going to change the way that web designers design, the way web sites look, and we think that there’s a great opportunity here. We got some fantastic investors, including Evan Williams from Twitter, Caterina Fake from Flickr and Matt Mullenweg from WordPress and a whole bunch of other people. So we got people that were very native to the Web to say “Yes, we believe it and we support you.” And so that all came together … and then as luck would have it, Jason Santa Maria, one of the biggest font geeks in the world and phenomenal designer was just coming out of Happy Cog where he and Jeffrey Zeldman had worked for years to start looking for his own project until we started working with him as well. Everything came together and that’s how Typekit sort of got its start.
所以我们回来了，我们和John谈了更多，他是Typekit的顾问，所以我们一直都在和他谈谈。 我们概述了基本的体系结构，如何工作，挖掘浏览器如何支持所有内容，走出去并与投资者进行了交谈，并说我们认为这将是一个很大的改变，它将改变网站设计师进行设计，网站的外观，我们认为这是一个巨大的机会。 我们吸引了一些出色的投资者，包括Twitter的 Evan Williams， Flickr的 Caterina Fake和WordPress的 Matt Mullenweg，以及其他许多人。 因此，我们让非常原生于网络的人们说：“是的，我们相信它，并为您提供支持。” 如此一来，一切……便是运气了，世界上最大的字体极客之一，杰出的设计师Jason Santa Maria刚从Happy Cog出来，他和Jeffrey Zeldman一起工作了多年，开始寻找为他自己的项目，直到我们也开始与他合作。 一切融合在一起，这就是Typekit开始的方式。
Kevin: So do you consider yourself a type geek?
凯文：那么你认为自己是一个极客类型吗？
Jeff: I have always been fascinated by typography but I’m not very good at it.
杰夫：我一直对版式着迷，但我不是很擅长。
Kevin: I think that describes a lot of web designers.
凯文：我认为这描述了很多网页设计师。
Jeff: Yeah, I know, I think so and I think frankly, we’ve never really had to be. There is such a limited selection of fonts on the web, there has increasingly been more control over how we can craft what we had. I have always loved— I mean I do see typefaces when I look out in the world, like I see signs and I see books and everything, and I’m like “that’s gorgeous, I love that.” I’ve never had the opportunity to really dig in and work with them. So I think yeah, I think like a lot of web designers, I am so glad that we’re going to have that opportunity now so that I can finally actually refine that desire that I’ve had to work with type.
杰夫：是的，我知道，我是这样认为的，并且坦率地说，我们从未真正如此。 网络上字体的选择非常有限，对我们如何制作现有字体的控制越来越多。 我一直爱着–我的意思是，当我看着世界时，我确实会看到字体，就像看到标志，看到书本和所有东西一样，我就像是“那太好了，我喜欢那个。” 我从来没有机会真正深入研究他们并与他们合作。 所以我想是的，我想像很多Web设计师一样，我很高兴我们现在能有这个机会，以便我最终可以真正地完善我必须使用type的那种愿望。
Kevin: Great. Well, here at SitePoint we’ve had the opportunity to play around with the Typekit preview a bit. The 36 fonts that are in the preview are a beautiful start, but can we expect hundreds, or even thousands, of fonts in the public launch? Like is Typekit aiming to be a boutique, a supermarket, or a warehouse for fonts?
凯文：太好了。 好吧，在SitePoint上，我们有机会试用了Typekit预览版。 预览中的36种字体是一个美好的开始，但是我们可以期望在公开发布中出现数百种甚至数千种字体吗？ Typekit的目标是成为精品店，超级市场还是字体仓库？
Jeff: I haven’t really thought of those categories. Hundreds is the answer that you’re looking for, for launch, and then a variety of levels of service, if you can imagine. You’ll be able to choose how big of a library you want to be able to use. There will be some sort of very exclusive typefaces that are highly desirable that will be in the special libraries and things like that. But the desire here—the strong desire that I’ve had from the very beginning and we as a team have always sort of rallied around—is that designers should be able to remove a business decision from a creative decision. So you should be able to essentially look at this library of type and use whatever you want for whatever projects you’re working on, for whatever makes sense, and know that you essentially have a flat rate subscription to do that. You shouldn’t have to worry about what are the … like this is a gorgeous typeface, what are the particular usage scenarios that I’m allowed to use it for.
杰夫：我还没有真正考虑过这些类别。 如果您能想象，数百个是您正在寻找的，启动的答案，然后是各种级别的服务。 您将可以选择要使用的库大小。 在特殊的库和类似的东西中，将有一些非常需要的非常特别的字体。 但是，这里的愿望(我从一开始就强烈渴望并且我们作为一个团队一直都在团结起来)是设计师应该能够从创意决策中删除业务决策。 因此，您应该基本上可以查看该类型的库，并根据需要将其所需的任何东西用于正在处理的项目，任何有意义的事情，并且知道您实际上具有固定费用的订阅才能做到这一点。 您不必担心……是什么，就像这是一个漂亮的字体，允许我使用它的特定使用场景是什么。
One of the big points of value that we’ve been trying to create is the simplification of all the licensing rules that are out there to say,if you use Typekit, here’s how it works and it’s very, very simple.
我们一直试图创造的最大价值点之一就是简化了所有要说的许可规则，如果您使用Typekit，这就是它的工作原理，而且非常非常简单。
Kevin: Alright. So the business decision is do we want to invest in typographic control of our look online and once that decision is made, it’s creative freedom from there, that’s the idea.
凯文：好吧。 因此，业务决策就是我们要对在线外观的版式控制进行投资，一旦做出决定，便是从那里进行创作的自由。
Jeff: That’s right.
杰夫：是的。
Kevin: Great. Does Typekit have exclusive distribution rights to the fonts that it will sell?
凯文：太好了。 Typekit是否拥有将出售的字体的独家发行权？
Jeff: No. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for not just competition, but for raising the bar on design on the Web, and I see no need for exclusivity in any of that. There should be many different models for how typography on the Web should work. We are going to be presenting a number of them, including a sort of subscription-based model. I can’t wait to see how these all plays out.
杰夫：不。我认为这不仅有竞争的机会，而且还有提高网络设计标准的巨大机会，我认为在任何情况下都不需要排他性。 关于网络排版应如何工作，应该有许多不同的模型。 我们将介绍其中的一些，包括一种基于订阅的模型。 我等不及要看看这些如何进行了。
Kevin: As you said, the biggest barrier that Typekit is taking down is the licensing issues surrounding bringing fonts to the Web. So obviously in the work you’ve done in setting up Typekit, you’ve spoken to probably as many type designers and foundries as possible. How receptive have they been to work you’re doing? Did you get a lot of “no”s?
凯文：正如您所说，Typekit消除的最大障碍是围绕将字体引入网络的许可问题。 因此，很明显，在设置Typekit的工作中，您已经与尽可能多的字体设计师和代工厂商进行了交谈。 他们对您正在做的工作的接受程度如何？ 你得到很多“否”吗？
Jeff: Well, as you can imagine, there’s a full spectrum. There were meetings where we sat down and type designers say, “this is exactly what we’ve been waiting for, where do we sign?” And they’ve been great partners, like digging deep into the technical specifications of OpenType to figure out what works on the browser, like unbelievable partners that we’ve had there.
杰夫：嗯，正如您所想象的那样，范围很广。 在一些会议上我们坐下来，字体设计师说：“这正是我们一直在等待的东西，我们要在哪里签名？” 他们一直是很好的合作伙伴，例如深入研究OpenType的技术规范以找出在浏览器上有效的工具，就像我们在那里拥有的令人难以置信的合作伙伴一样。
There are also people that have been very skeptical, and I can totally understand that as well. The type industry has over the last 30 years has seen proposal after proposal for different formats and different technologies and different ways that people who know better are going to sell their fonts. And rightly so, they should be skeptical but for the most part, it’s been sort of in the middle. Like, “Well why don’t we try with a few of our typefaces and see how that might work and let’s see how we can grow that in the future…” and I think everybody’s really interested.
也有人对此非常怀疑，我也完全可以理解。 在过去的30年中，字体行业看到了一个又一个的提案，那就是针对不同格式，不同技术以及更了解情况的人们将出售其字体的不同方式。 没错，他们应该对此表示怀疑，但在大多数情况下，它处于中间位置。 就像，“嗯，为什么不尝试一些字体，看看它可能如何工作，让我们看看将来如何发展呢……”，我认为每个人都非常感兴趣。
And I think across the board, we have had an acknowledgment from everybody that we’ve talked to that things are changing right now, that this isn’t just another like proposal for Microsoft or anything like that, but that the Web is ready for this, that there’s been a convergence of higher bandwidth and browser technology and designers ready and sort of a maturation of the whole industry that now is the time that we really address this and let’s figure that out. And you can see that, like if you go to look at Typophile, which is a popular online forum for type designers, or even with W3C Web Font mailing list, there’s an unbelievable amount of participation and interest in how these technologies play out and how they match up with what the needs of type designers and type foundries really are.
而且我认为，从所有人那里得到的认可是，我们与之交谈的一切都正在发生变化，这不仅是针对Microsoft的提案，还是类似的事情，但Web已经为因此，更高的带宽和浏览器技术已经融合在一起，设计师已经准备就绪，整个行业已经成熟，现在正是我们真正解决这个问题的时候了，让我们弄清楚这一点。 而且您可以看到，就像您去看看Typophile (这是字体设计师的流行在线论坛)，甚至使用W3C Web Font邮件列表一样 ，对于这些技术如何发挥作用以及如何发挥作用，都有令人难以置信的参与和兴趣。它们与类型设计师和类型代工厂的真正需求相匹配。
Kevin: Speaking of that, you recently wrote on the Typekit blog about your support for the dot web font file format proposal. What do you think that proposal, if it turns into a working technology, what does that achieve over what we have now?
凯文：说到这一点，您最近在Typekit博客上写了关于对点Web字体文件格式建议的支持。 您如何看待该提案，如果它变成了一项可行的技术，那么与我们现在拥有的相比，会取得什么成就？
Jeff: So, I think from a type designer point of view, they are simply asking that browsers support a format for fonts that is different for viewing than for creating. And that’s one of the reasons why this is such a big issue and why you can’t just say well, look, it’s worked for photographers and it’s worked for videos, it’s worked for music. Why would the browsers need to do anything special for fonts? The reality is that it is literally the source code of the tool that font designers make. They give you a font and they are giving you literally the entire source code and saying “here you go, you’ve got it now.” And so it does feel a little bit different.
杰夫：所以，我认为从类型设计者的角度来看，他们只是在要求浏览器支持一种字体格式，这种字体在查看和创建上是不同的。 这就是为什么这是一个大问题的原因之一，为什么您不能说得好，看，它对摄影师有效，对视频有效，对音乐有效。 为什么浏览器需要对字体进行特殊处理？ 实际情况是，它实际上是字体设计者制作的工具的源代码。 他们为您提供了一种字体，并且为您提供了整个源代码，并说：“到这里，您已经拥有了它。” 因此，感觉确实有所不同。
That said, on the browser side of things, they need for an open web to work, to not be completely agnostic when it links to stuff. So there is this tension right there. I think as an industry, whether it’s a web industry or font industry or whatever, we need to sort of work through that and figure that out. Now, I don’t think we’ll ever put the genie back in the bottle; I think we will always like to OpenType fonts. I don’t think Mozilla’s going to stop doing that and Firefox and WebKit will take it away. But, I also think that there’s an opportunity for any kind of new format to help type designers sort of figure out the right thing that works best for them.
也就是说，在事物的浏览器方面，他们需要一个开放的网络才能正常工作，以便在链接到事物时不会完全不可知。 因此，那里存在这种紧张局势。 我认为作为一个行业，无论是网络行业，字体行业还是其他行业，我们都需要对此进行分类并弄清楚。 现在，我认为我们永远不会把精灵放回瓶子里。 我认为我们将一直喜欢OpenType字体。 我认为Mozilla不会停止这样做，而Firefox和WebKit会取代它。 但是，我也认为，任何一种新格式都有机会帮助字体设计师找出最适合他们的正确方法。
Now, for the reason that I think that Typekit should support that is because we completely support that process—an open exchange between the parties that are interested. That hasn’t traditionally happened in the past. When the web fonts first emerged back in 1998 or 1999 or whenever it was, it was literally like Microsoft made something up, Bitstream worked with Netscape, they made something up, they all watched, and it didn’t really feel like there was this open and collaborative discussion about it. So I’m super happy that that’s happening now.
现在，出于我认为Typekit应该支持的原因，是因为我们完全支持该过程—感兴趣的各方之间的公开交换。 过去传统上没有发生过这种情况。 当Web字体在1998或1999年首次出现时，或者无论何时出现，字面上就好像微软做了些什么，Bitstream与Netscape一起工作了，他们做了一些，他们都观看了，并且真的没有感觉到有这种字体了。对此进行公开和协作的讨论。 因此，我对现在正在发生的事情感到非常高兴。
I also think that, frankly, building a web-based font format is going to get around a lot of patenting and licensing issues that may be embedded deeply in some of the software that we have now. So as an analogy, when I started on the Web, we had GIF and we had JPEG and for a while, like there was this patent thing that said like, is every sight that has a gif on it going to have pay a licensing fee to the patent holders, I think it was Unasys at the time, right? And so there was concern about that, and so a group got together and did this completely open format called PNG files. And they’ve been really successful and it’s really worked. That doesn’t mean GIF and JPEG don’t work on the web anymore, but now there is an open and unencumbered file format for images that everybody has really embraced.
坦率地说，我还认为，构建基于Web的字体格式将解决很多专利和许可问题，这些问题可能深深地嵌入到我们现在拥有的某些软件中。 打个比方，当我在网上开始时，我们有了GIF，我们有了JPEG，有一段时间，就像有这样的专利说的那样，每一个拥有gif的景象都要支付许可费。对于专利持有人，我认为当时是Unasys，对吗？ 因此，人们对此表示关注，于是一个小组聚在一起，完成了称为PNG文件的完全开放格式。 他们确实非常成功，而且确实奏效。 这并不意味着GIF和JPEG不能再在网络上运行了，但是现在有了一个开放的，不受限制的文件格式，供所有人真正使用。
Kevin: The mere existence of that format removes the threat that existed with GIF.
凯文：这种格式的存在消除了GIF所存在的威胁。
Jeff: That’s right. So, I think that’s great. That may take a couple of years and that is not going to slow down web typography at all but it will give us an alternative that is completely open and that will be great. So yes, we totally support that and that’s the direction the industry should go.
杰夫：是的。 所以，我认为那太好了。 这可能会花费几年时间，并且完全不会减慢Web排版的速度，但是它将为我们提供一个完全开放的替代方案，而且效果很好。 因此，是的，我们完全支持这一点，这就是该行业应该走的方向。
I think at the same time, hosted font services like Typekit, have plenty of time to help develop a market, develop an industry, move into other things as well. I think there’s all kinds of opportunity for hosted styles and all of that is going to be happening in addition, in parallel with whatever standards-based movement we see.
我认为，与此同时，诸如Typekit之类的托管字体服务也有足够的时间来帮助开发市场，发展行业以及转移到其他领域。 我认为托管样式有各种各样的机会，而且除了我们看到的任何基于标准的移动之外，所有这些都会另外发生。
Kevin: You mentioned earlier that something that the foundries are clearly worried about is the threat of piracy with their fonts. That if they take their fonts to the Web in the wrong way, that threat is going to remove the value of their product. Is that another case of trying to put the genie back in the bottle because it seems to me like the fonts are already out there, if what someone wants to do is steal fonts. Is that a real threat or is that just something you need to address to satisfy their fears?
凯文：您之前提到过，代工厂显然担心的是其字体存在盗版威胁。 如果他们以错误的方式将字体带到Web上，那么这种威胁将失去其产品的价值。 那是另一种试图将精灵放回瓶子的案例，因为在我看来，如果有人想要窃取字体，字体就已经在那里了。 这是真正的威胁，还是您只需要解决一些问题以满足他们的恐惧？
Jeff: No. I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as “the foundries are concerned with piracy.” The fact that there’s been browser development doesn’t change their position on that. You take any font you want and you put the word torrent behind it and you search for it in Google and it’s there. And all of the foundries know that, everybody knows that and there’s no putting that genie back into the bottle, I can guarantee that. That has not impacted the sales of the fonts whatsoever. It’s the reality of how the world works right now and they acknowledge that. What they are concerned about is the availability of fonts in such an open, and sort of cavalier manner, that people are confused about the need to pay for licenses or things like that.
杰夫：不。我不一定将其描述为“代工厂商与盗版有关”。 浏览器开发的事实并没有改变他们对此的立场。 您可以使用所需的任何字体，然后在其后加上“洪流”一词，然后在Google中搜索它。 所有的铸造厂都知道，每个人都知道，而且没有把那个精灵放回瓶子里的，我可以保证。 但这并没有影响字体的销售。 这是当今世界如何运转的现实，他们也承认这一点。 他们关心的是字体的公开性和灵活性，人们对需要支付许可证或类似费用感到困惑。
The phrase that we’ve use over and over again is ‘casual misuse’, where I look at a web site, “Ooo, that’s a nice looking font.” I take the font and sell it and just start using it. I don’t realize that I’ve broken any sort of license or copyright. I think that’s something that we’ve seen… like if you look at the RIAA lawsuits here in America, it is mostly people that downloaded music and kind of didn’t realize that they were sharing it back; they didn’t realize that Limewire or Napster worked that way and suddenly, lawyers were sending them letters. That’s what the type industry doesn’t want to see happen and I have a lot of respect for that.
我们一遍又一遍地使用的短语是“随意滥用”，在我看到的一个网站上，“哦，这是一个不错的字体。” 我将字体出售并开始使用。 我没有意识到自己已经违反了任何许可证或版权。 我认为这是我们所看到的……就像您在美国RIAA诉讼案中看到的那样，多数是下载音乐的人，而有些却没有意识到他们正在共享音乐。 他们没有意识到Limewire或Napster是这样工作的，突然之间，律师们给他们发了信。 这就是字体行业不想发生的事情，对此我深表敬意。
It is the exact same thing that Corbis or any of the other… Getty Images has with online stock photography. They want to make sure that… they totally realize that with an <img> tag, you can right click on it and pick the image. They just want to make sure people understand that these are licensed images and that there are certain mechanisms set up for compensating the people who those licenses.
这与Corbis或其他任何东西完全一样…… Getty Images在在线股票摄影中拥有。 他们想确保……他们完全意识到，使用<img>标签 ，您可以右键单击它并选择图像。 他们只是想确保人们了解这些是许可的图像，并且设置了某些机制来补偿那些许可的人。
So that’s what the type industry is looking at and suggesting, and that’s why we have, from the beginning, said that Typekit hasn’t tried to implement any DRM or anything like that but we are putting in place ways to protect our service, so that people don’t just hotlink to the fonts and aren’t just using the service that we’re providing without any payment, or that people are pulling fonts out of their cache file, installing them, and thinking that, that’s okay. So there are a few layers, from HTTP referrer checking through some segmented fonts and license text that you explicitly have to remove, that kind of stuff. Put all of those things in place and it’s something that resonates with the foundries that were working with and have talked to.
这就是类型行业正在研究和提出的建议，这就是为什么我们从一开始就表示Typekit并没有尝试实现任何DRM或类似的东西，但是我们正在采取适当的方式来保护我们的服务，因此人们不只是热链接到字体，还不仅仅是使用我们提供的服务而无需支付任何费用，或者人们正在从其缓存文件中提取字体，进行安装，然后认为这没关系。 因此，从HTTP引荐来源网址检查到您明确要删除的某些分段字体和许可证文本，这些层就包括了几层。 将所有这些内容放置在适当的位置，这会使与之合作并一直在与之交谈的代工厂产生共鸣。
Kevin: Can we talk about Photoshop for a minute? Clearly Photoshop is a tool that a lot of web designers start a new design in. If they’re going to use a service-like Typekit to serve their fonts on their finished product, are they going to have also buy a print license to the font so that they can load it into the Photoshop and do their mockups?
凯文：我们可以谈一谈Photoshop吗？ 显然，Photoshop是许多Web设计师开始进行新设计的工具。如果他们打算使用类似服务的Typekit在其制成品上提供其字体，他们是否还将购买该产品的印刷许可？字体，以便他们可以将其加载到Photoshop中并制作模型？
Jeff: Right. Well, that’s a fantastic question because we’ve always said we want designers to be able to work the way that they always have, and so that’s something that we’re actively talking to foundries about, about to what extent can we still allow them to do that and it’s something that we have to figure out together with them and find a really good solution for. So right now, like I wanted to make sure that it was possible for designers who still code by hand or still to do the production of their sites, however they do it, whether use a blogging platform or whether they use content management system or whether they use Textmate and write markup all day. Photoshop is a piece of that and we’re actively looking at how we can help designers to do that.
杰夫：对。 好吧，这是一个奇妙的问题，因为我们一直说我们希望设计师能够以他们一直拥有的方式工作，所以我们一直在积极地与代工厂商谈，我们还能在多大程度上允许他们为此，我们必须与他们一起找出并找到一个非常好的解决方案。 因此，现在，就像我想确保的那样，无论是使用博客平台还是使用内容管理系统，还是仍然使用手工编写代码或仍在进行站点制作的设计师，都可以这样做。他们整天使用Textmate并编写标记。 Photoshop就是其中的一部分，我们正在积极研究如何帮助设计师实现这一目标。
Kevin: Yeah, so it’s fair to say it’s an unsolved problem at the moment, but it’s clearly one you’re working on.
凯文：是的，可以公平地说，目前这是一个尚未解决的问题，但显然这是您正在努力解决的问题。
Jeff: It is absolutely one thing we are focused on, yes.
杰夫：绝对是我们关注的一件事，是的。
Kevin: Speaking for myself, I think if I as a design firm had maybe committed to using Typekit for a year or something like that, I would think it fair then for the type to be available to me in other formats for re-use in my design work. I’m just thinking out loud here but that’s kind of what I would expect.
Kevin: Speaking for myself, I think if I as a design firm had maybe committed to using Typekit for a year or something like that, I would think it fair then for the type to be available to me in other formats for re-use in my design work. I'm just thinking out loud here but that's kind of what I would expect.
Jeff: No, that’s great feedback.
Jeff: No, that's great feedback.
Kevin: One of the big technical problems that Typekit solves is this whole thing of Internet Explorer only supporting the EOT format for downloadable fonts and that mess creating that format can be. How has that format been to develop for?
Kevin: One of the big technical problems that Typekit solves is this whole thing of Internet Explorer only supporting the EOT format for downloadable fonts and that mess creating that format can be. How has that format been to develop for?
Jeff: Well, it’s been challenging and I think that’s because honestly, it hasn’t been very widely implemented, right? If you think about lots of open source products, you’ve got millions of eyes and hundreds of hands actively developing and looking at these things and things get really hashed out and tools emerge right? There’s a couple of Python scripts that generate EOT, we’re using an open source library and modifying it deeply to get it to all work but that’s a lot of uncharted territory; I’ll be perfectly honest.
Jeff: Well, it's been challenging and I think that's because honestly, it hasn't been very widely implemented, right? If you think about lots of open source products, you've got millions of eyes and hundreds of hands actively developing and looking at these things and things get really hashed out and tools emerge right? There's a couple of Python scripts that generate EOT, we're using an open source library and modifying it deeply to get it to all work but that's a lot of uncharted territory; I'll be perfectly honest.
And so we have put a ton of effort into that and we have really great results, so that’s also one of the reasons why where you JavaScript so that you can – you put a link in your page, we generate the CSS and we serve the right CSS to the right browsers and the right font format to the browsers. So it is another one of our key points of value is that web designers won’t have to go through all that hassle to generate EOT if they want to support Internet Explorer. Now, I know that it’s become sort of like Internet Explorer as almost as an entire category has kind of it’s starting to take this like second level of priority for a lot of designers. Like, I do standards compliance design; it looks really good in Safari and Firefox and then I figure out what I can serve to Internet Explorer, but we also believe that typography is going to be a way that a lot of people really leverage their brands that they have a lot of equity in. You wouldn’t think of not sending your corporate logo to Internet Explorer and so likewise, I think if people sort of craft their brands around type treatments in web pages increasingly over the next month and years, that they’re not going to be able to just ignore Internet Explorer when it comes to that. So we’re going to have to do something there. And so that why we’re putting so much effort in investing so much and energy into figuring out how to best support the EOT format and to work with it every day.
And so we have put a ton of effort into that and we have really great results, so that's also one of the reasons why where you JavaScript so that you can – you put a link in your page, we generate the CSS and we serve the right CSS to the right browsers and the right font format to the browsers. So it is another one of our key points of value is that web designers won't have to go through all that hassle to generate EOT if they want to support Internet Explorer. Now, I know that it's become sort of like Internet Explorer as almost as an entire category has kind of it's starting to take this like second level of priority for a lot of designers. Like, I do standards compliance design; it looks really good in Safari and Firefox and then I figure out what I can serve to Internet Explorer, but we also believe that typography is going to be a way that a lot of people really leverage their brands that they have a lot of equity in. You wouldn't think of not sending your corporate logo to Internet Explorer and so likewise, I think if people sort of craft their brands around type treatments in web pages increasingly over the next month and years, that they're not going to be able to just ignore Internet Explorer when it comes to that. So we're going to have to do something there. And so that why we're putting so much effort in investing so much and energy into figuring out how to best support the EOT format and to work with it every day.
Kevin: Yeah, just as an example, SitePoint recently spun off a new company called Flippa.com and in the design of the logo for that new company, we even had the discussion of “alright, for the text portion of this logo, we want to use a font that we will hopefully be able to serve to browsers as text, rather than as an image.” So it’s already creeping into the discussion.
Kevin: Yeah, just as an example, SitePoint recently spun off a new company called Flippa.com and in the design of the logo for that new company, we even had the discussion of “alright, for the text portion of this logo, we want to use a font that we will hopefully be able to serve to browsers as text, rather than as an image.” So it's already creeping into the discussion.
What’s fascinating to me is that this ability— As critical as the licensing issues are, and solving those is a great strength of services like Typekit, one of the big points of value as you say that is going to get designers over the line is the fact that it solves the Internet Explorer problem, but if a format like .webfont comes along in a year or two, if everything goes perfectly, we see support for it in Internet Explorer 9 or something like that (dare I hope), that portion of your value proposition could fade away, and yet I think it’s what will get people in the door today and once they’re using a service like that, once they’re used to thinking of fonts as a service that they pay for, I think they’ll be comfortable doing that going forward, even if the Internet Explorer problem goes away.
What's fascinating to me is that this ability— As critical as the licensing issues are, and solving those is a great strength of services like Typekit, one of the big points of value as you say that is going to get designers over the line is the fact that it solves the Internet Explorer problem, but if a format like .webfont comes along in a year or two, if everything goes perfectly, we see support for it in Internet Explorer 9 or something like that (dare I hope), that portion of your value proposition could fade away, and yet I think it's what will get people in the door today and once they're using a service like that, once they're used to thinking of fonts as a service that they pay for, I think they'll be comfortable doing that going forward, even if the Internet Explorer problem goes away.
Jeff: Oh, I totally agree. I’ll give you an analogy. I’ve got a friend from way back, named Lynda Weinman that I’m sure many long-time developers are familiar with, and she has built Lynda.com into this kind of publishing empire—publishing and training and all this great stuff—she started her career grappling with the Netscape color cube. Like that’s how he got started. Like color is a disaster in the web, you only have 256 and there are these colors and you have to render your images… She wrote book after book about dealing with web color, was tremendously successful, and of course… I mean we haven’t thought about that in a decade now, right? But clearly, there are points of pain that designers face every day today, and I think Typekit can solve many of those points of pain and will continue to do that even if some them of go away in the future.
Jeff: Oh, I totally agree. I'll give you an analogy. I've got a friend from way back, named Lynda Weinman that I'm sure many long-time developers are familiar with, and she has built Lynda.com into this kind of publishing empire—publishing and training and all this great stuff—she started her career grappling with the Netscape color cube. Like that's how he got started. Like color is a disaster in the web, you only have 256 and there are these colors and you have to render your images… She wrote book after book about dealing with web color, was tremendously successful, and of course… I mean we haven't thought about that in a decade now, right? But clearly, there are points of pain that designers face every day today, and I think Typekit can solve many of those points of pain and will continue to do that even if some them of go away in the future.
Kevin: Speaking of points of pain, what are your thoughts on some of the cross-browser, cross-platform rendering issues that exist with downloadable fonts?
Kevin: Speaking of points of pain, what are your thoughts on some of the cross-browser, cross-platform rendering issues that exist with downloadable fonts?
Jeff: There’s kind of three places where that can be an issue. One is in the browser and operating system. One is in the font files themselves, and then one is in some of the services that we can provide through JavaScript’s libraries and through different style sheets for different browsers. So we are, of course, doing as much as we possibly can, right? There are like Firefox and Safari, they interpret some of the internal metrics of OpenType files slightly differently and you can correct for that with CSS. So we’re doing some of that kind of stuff, so that at least you get comparable metrics in the two browsers.
Jeff: There's kind of three places where that can be an issue. One is in the browser and operating system. One is in the font files themselves, and then one is in some of the services that we can provide through JavaScript's libraries and through different style sheets for different browsers. So we are, of course, doing as much as we possibly can, right? There are like Firefox and Safari, they interpret some of the internal metrics of OpenType files slightly differently and you can correct for that with CSS. So we're doing some of that kind of stuff, so that at least you get comparable metrics in the two browsers.
There are ways of working with type designers so that the foundries that are part of Typekit, we are normalizing a lot of the internal metrics of their fonts or helping them to figure out what works best on the Web, that sort of give and take in that collaboration. So, that’s been fantastic.
There are ways of working with type designers so that the foundries that are part of Typekit, we are normalizing a lot of the internal metrics of their fonts or helping them to figure out what works best on the Web, that sort of give and take in that collaboration. So, that's been fantastic.
Fonts show up and some of the very early test cases that people have published with the technology preview of Typekit, people have noticed sometimes the font gets clipped in the baseline and things like that, that’s entirely stuff that we’re correcting with the foundries. And we’re working because, you know, they’ve never had to put their fonts in browsers and we’re sorting all of that kind of stuff out.
Fonts show up and some of the very early test cases that people have published with the technology preview of Typekit, people have noticed sometimes the font gets clipped in the baseline and things like that, that's entirely stuff that we're correcting with the foundries. And we're working because, you know, they've never had to put their fonts in browsers and we're sorting all of that kind of stuff out.
And then there’s all the rendering engines themselves, and that is going to get even more complicated, I can assure you. Like, I’ve seen there’s an open bug in Bugzilla for the next version of Firefox that says well maybe we should use a different rendering engine for fonts just that were linked rather than fonts that are native to the browser. Yeah, it’s going to get really complicated. My best case scenari—what I would love to see—is that there is a tradeoff between what designers can control over how it’s rendered that then kind of cascades to what users really want. And you saw, probably, we’re tracking what happened when Safari for Windows launched and they used a different font rendering system. Right? The people hated it or they loved it. It was one or the other, but nobody was neutral on that, and so quickly, Safari put a preference and so you could put it back to ClearType.
And then there's all the rendering engines themselves, and that is going to get even more complicated, I can assure you. Like, I've seen there's an open bug in Bugzilla for the next version of Firefox that says well maybe we should use a different rendering engine for fonts just that were linked rather than fonts that are native to the browser. Yeah, it's going to get really complicated. My best case scenari—what I would love to see—is that there is a tradeoff between what designers can control over how it's rendered that then kind of cascades to what users really want. And you saw, probably, we're tracking what happened when Safari for Windows launched and they used a different font rendering system. 对？ The people hated it or they loved it. It was one or the other, but nobody was neutral on that, and so quickly, Safari put a preference and so you could put it back to ClearType.
So, I think it would be great if the designers had control over how their web pages were rendered by the browsers but then end users could decide whether or not they wanted to let designers have that control. I mean, kind of the way that style sheets work anyway, right? So that’s going to be complicated because it takes us a while to figure that out.
So, I think it would be great if the designers had control over how their web pages were rendered by the browsers but then end users could decide whether or not they wanted to let designers have that control. I mean, kind of the way that style sheets work anyway, right? So that's going to be complicated because it takes us a while to figure that out.
I think another good example of this is what happens while we’re waiting for the font to get to that browser. Like, all the browsers do that differently as well.
I think another good example of this is what happens while we're waiting for the font to get to that browser. Like, all the browsers do that differently as well.
Kevin: Yeah. I know when I did some testing in Safari and I hit a page with some custom fonts, it’s like I could hear some gears squeaking inside the browser as a bit of logic that is buried so deeply because, as far as the browser’s concerned, “wow, I’ve never had to do that before” and it just sort of ground to life. You know, I saw the spinning beach ball for a few seconds and then uuugghhh, it got it and the font was there. But, yeah, it seems like the browsers, they support this but supporting it and supporting it well are two different things.
凯文：是的。 I know when I did some testing in Safari and I hit a page with some custom fonts, it's like I could hear some gears squeaking inside the browser as a bit of logic that is buried so deeply because, as far as the browser's concerned, “wow, I've never had to do that before” and it just sort of ground to life. You know, I saw the spinning beach ball for a few seconds and then uuugghhh, it got it and the font was there. But, yeah, it seems like the browsers, they support this but supporting it and supporting it well are two different things.
Jeff: Yeah, well, that’s going to be iterative.
Jeff: Yeah, well, that's going to be iterative.
Kevin: Yeah, exactly. So, once the designers start using this, the browsers are going to have some work to do to improve their support for it.
凯文：是的，确实如此。 So, once the designers start using this, the browsers are going to have some work to do to improve their support for it.
Jeff: Yeah and again, I’m thankful that that iteration happens much more quickly now.
Jeff: Yeah and again, I'm thankful that that iteration happens much more quickly now.
There is also some control you can have over that and we’ve been experimenting with that quite a bit. Our JavaScript solution is based on jQuery, it has the ability to hold off on rendering the fonts until documentReady, for example. I don’t know if that’s the right solution but we can certainly offer that as an option. So, again, try to put some of that control back into the designer’s hands and try to, maybe, smooth out the differences between the different browsers. I don’t know. We’re experimenting with that. We’ll see what works.
There is also some control you can have over that and we've been experimenting with that quite a bit. Our JavaScript solution is based on jQuery , it has the ability to hold off on rendering the fonts until documentReady , for example. I don't know if that's the right solution but we can certainly offer that as an option. So, again, try to put some of that control back into the designer's hands and try to, maybe, smooth out the differences between the different browsers. 我不知道。 We're experimenting with that. We'll see what works.
I think there’s also going to be the responsibility of the designers. You could put a couple of megabytes worth of photos on a page, and your users are probably going to complain and they’re going to complain by hitting the Back button. We’ve seen that.
I think there's also going to be the responsibility of the designers. You could put a couple of megabytes worth of photos on a page, and your users are probably going to complain and they're going to complain by hitting the Back button. We've seen that.
Performance is one of the most important parts of usability. It always has been. That hasn’t changed. When I was at Google and when the rest of the Typekit team, when we were at Google, we focused on latency as a company priority. There were times when the whole company would say, “For the next three weeks, no features get added to any of our products. All we’re going to work on is trimming milliseconds from every user experience.” And so, I think there are features that we’re putting into Typekit that are going to help with that. So, you don’t need to send an entire font if you don’t need the entire font.
Performance is one of the most important parts of usability. It always has been. That hasn't changed. When I was at Google and when the rest of the Typekit team, when we were at Google, we focused on latency as a company priority. There were times when the whole company would say, “For the next three weeks, no features get added to any of our products. All we're going to work on is trimming milliseconds from every user experience.” And so, I think there are features that we're putting into Typekit that are going to help with that. So, you don't need to send an entire font if you don't need the entire font.
Kevin: Yeah, you might just need the five letters in your logo.
Kevin: Yeah, you might just need the five letters in your logo.
Jeff: That’s right. So we are subsetting fonts aggressively so that designers can decide exactly what they want. Like if you’re just using that font for the logo, just send those characters. But if you need all those foreign currency symbols, by all means, add them back in. If you’ve been experimenting a little bit with the Typekit interface, you can see that we’ve got all of these controls for what weights you want to put in, what set of glyphs you want to put in, that kind of stuff; trying to make it very clear that every decision you make is going to cost you a bit of bandwidth. I’ve seen some really, really beautiful stuff that’s done with 20 or 30K worth of fonts.
杰夫：是的。 So we are subsetting fonts aggressively so that designers can decide exactly what they want. Like if you're just using that font for the logo, just send those characters. But if you need all those foreign currency symbols, by all means, add them back in. If you've been experimenting a little bit with the Typekit interface, you can see that we've got all of these controls for what weights you want to put in, what set of glyphs you want to put in, that kind of stuff; trying to make it very clear that every decision you make is going to cost you a bit of bandwidth. I've seen some really, really beautiful stuff that's done with 20 or 30K worth of fonts.
We’ve also put a lot of effort into making sure that the fonts are geographically located. So, if you are viewing the SitePoint page from you office there in Melbourne, you’re loading the font from our data center in Sydney. Whereas I load it from San Jose, we’ve got fonts all over the world—in Europe, in Asia, across North America—so the latency is very, very fast. We’ve gotten latency under 75 milliseconds for the request.
We've also put a lot of effort into making sure that the fonts are geographically located. So, if you are viewing the SitePoint page from you office there in Melbourne, you're loading the font from our data center in Sydney. Whereas I load it from San Jose, we've got fonts all over the world—in Europe, in Asia, across North America—so the latency is very, very fast. We've gotten latency under 75 milliseconds for the request.
I’ve seen some concern about, “Well, it’s a third party service and I don’t trust third party services…” Once you start experimenting with how a global network of data centers work, you’ll see that the fact that it can be as fast as any web site that’s out there.
I've seen some concern about, “Well, it's a third party service and I don't trust third party services…” Once you start experimenting with how a global network of data centers work, you'll see that the fact that it can be as fast as any web site that's out there.
So, a combination of all of this in the mix is going to help us get through some of these early steps in web typography.
So, a combination of all of this in the mix is going to help us get through some of these early steps in web typography.
Kevin: Okay. Well, we may have covered some of this already but, by offering properly licensed downloadable fonts that browsers supports today, Typekit removes a huge barrier for sophisticated type design on the Web. What is the next problem? Once designers have Typekit and they start using it, what’s the next barrier to sophisticated typography that they’re going to encounter and who’s problem is that?
凯文：好的。 Well, we may have covered some of this already but, by offering properly licensed downloadable fonts that browsers supports today, Typekit removes a huge barrier for sophisticated type design on the Web. What is the next problem? Once designers have Typekit and they start using it, what's the next barrier to sophisticated typography that they're going to encounter and who's problem is that?
Jeff: I think we have to learn how to do typography on the Web. I don’t think we know how, honestly, as a community, and I think focusing on supporting that community is going to be really important.
Jeff: I think we have to learn how to do typography on the Web. I don't think we know how, honestly, as a community, and I think focusing on supporting that community is going to be really important.
I look back, with inspiration, on what designers like Jeffrey Zeldman and Doug Bowman did with standards-based design a few years ago, where we kind of didn’t know how to do it and they led the way. Doug would do these amazing designs and people would view source and he’d write up tutorials and they’d go, “Holy Cow! I can totally do that! Like, wow! That’s amazing.” I think we have to do that with typography now.
I look back, with inspiration, on what designers like Jeffrey Zeldman and Doug Bowman did with standards-based design a few years ago, where we kind of didn't know how to do it and they led the way. Doug would do these amazing designs and people would view source and he'd write up tutorials and they'd go, “Holy Cow! I can totally do that! Like, wow! That's amazing.” I think we have to do that with typography now.
I think we clearly need like what Dave Shea did with the CSS Zen Garden, we need a fonts garden, right? And so, we have been looking very closely at how we can support all of that. How we can take best practices and examples and inspirations of things that have been built, not just with Typekit, but clearly with all the Typekit fonts, and expose that to the world and teach people like what is possible to do now that we don’t have to rely on Flash or images to have some typographic quality in our pages now.
I think we clearly need like what Dave Shea did with the CSS Zen Garden , we need a fonts garden, right? And so, we have been looking very closely at how we can support all of that. How we can take best practices and examples and inspirations of things that have been built, not just with Typekit, but clearly with all the Typekit fonts, and expose that to the world and teach people like what is possible to do now that we don't have to rely on Flash or images to have some typographic quality in our pages now.
Kevin: How will Typekit, and services like it, change typography or change type design itself? Because there are fonts that, no matter how good the rendering technology gets, they’re just not going to look good on screen. And I think there are fonts that haven’t been designed yet that will look great on the Web.
Kevin: How will Typekit, and services like it, change typography or change type design itself? Because there are fonts that, no matter how good the rendering technology gets, they're just not going to look good on screen. And I think there are fonts that haven't been designed yet that will look great on the Web.
Jeff: And I think there’s also, to add to your point, constraints that type designers have never had to consider before, like file size. Right? We’re going to need to not only optimize on screen hinting for 9 point type and make it really legible and get the kerning pairs and the hinting and get all that stuff to really look good at screen resolutions, but we’re also going to have to be concerned with network performance, and the way the browsers handle things, and all of the stuff that we’re going to start to see in CSS. Like, what happens with ligatures when your filling out form fields. Has anybody thought about that? You know what I mean? And the fact is that, yes, people have thought about that. They’ve worked on Firefox and they’ve worked on WebKit and they’re putting that stuff in there but, man, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover both as web designers and as type designers.
Jeff: And I think there's also, to add to your point, constraints that type designers have never had to consider before, like file size. 对？ We're going to need to not only optimize on screen hinting for 9 point type and make it really legible and get the kerning pairs and the hinting and get all that stuff to really look good at screen resolutions, but we're also going to have to be concerned with network performance, and the way the browsers handle things, and all of the stuff that we're going to start to see in CSS. Like, what happens with ligatures when your filling out form fields. Has anybody thought about that? 你知道我的意思？ And the fact is that, yes, people have thought about that. They've worked on Firefox and they've worked on WebKit and they're putting that stuff in there but, man, we've got a lot of ground to cover both as web designers and as type designers.
Kevin: As designers sink their teeth into the new possibilities that fonts bring, they’re going to be finding, I guess, fonts that work, fonts that don’t, fonts that work in unexpected ways; will Typekit be exploring along with them and providing some guidance to designers?
Kevin: As designers sink their teeth into the new possibilities that fonts bring, they're going to be finding, I guess, fonts that work, fonts that don't, fonts that work in unexpected ways; will Typekit be exploring along with them and providing some guidance to designers?
Jeff: We always have. We already have been. We absolutely have been, both web and type designers, we have been really digging in and seeing what’s working and we are going to be building and launching lots of, sort of, community oriented features. It’s sort of Web Typography 101. Like, here’s how it works, here’s where you go and do that kind of stuff because, ultimately, like our goal here is to make the whole Web better. I am a 100% convinced that web typography is going to do that. We’re going to have some more semantic text on the Web, it’s going to have richer design applied to it. The Web is going to get more accessible. We’re going to have better search engine optimization. Like all of this stuff is going to get better because we can finally use HTML with fonts.
Jeff: We always have. We already have been. We absolutely have been, both web and type designers, we have been really digging in and seeing what's working and we are going to be building and launching lots of, sort of, community oriented features. It's sort of Web Typography 101. Like, here's how it works, here's where you go and do that kind of stuff because, ultimately, like our goal here is to make the whole Web better. I am a 100% convinced that web typography is going to do that. We're going to have some more semantic text on the Web, it's going to have richer design applied to it. The Web is going to get more accessible. We're going to have better search engine optimization. Like all of this stuff is going to get better because we can finally use HTML with fonts.
So, I think we have a lot to learn, and I think Typekit is going to try to be at the center of a lot of that, trying to help promote best practices and make the Web a better place.
So, I think we have a lot to learn, and I think Typekit is going to try to be at the center of a lot of that, trying to help promote best practices and make the Web a better place.
Kevin: Speaking for SitePoint, we look forward to showcasing a lot of that work.
Kevin: Speaking for SitePoint, we look forward to showcasing a lot of that work.
Jeff, thanks for joining us. Would you like to tell our listeners where they can go to follow you and to follow up on stuff they’ve learned about in this podcast?
Jeff, thanks for joining us. Would you like to tell our listeners where they can go to follow you and to follow up on stuff they've learned about in this podcast?
Jeff: Sure, absolutely. You can go to typekit.com and you can do three things there. You can enter your email address, so that you can be one of the first to get an invitation when we start rolling those out very soon. You can also follow a link over to our blog, where we’re really getting deep into the technology of how all of this works, and then you can also follow us on Twitter, where we have a pretty engaged conversation with everybody.
Jeff: Sure, absolutely. You can go to typekit.com and you can do three things there. You can enter your email address, so that you can be one of the first to get an invitation when we start rolling those out very soon. You can also follow a link over to our blog , where we're really getting deep into the technology of how all of this works, and then you can also follow us on Twitter , where we have a pretty engaged conversation with everybody.
That’s all at typekit.com.
That's all at typekit.com.
Kevin: Great. Thanks again for joining us.
凯文：太好了。 Thanks again for joining us.
Jeff: Thanks so much, Kevin. This was a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate it.
Jeff: Thanks so much, Kevin. This was a fantastic conversation. 我真的很感激。
Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview, please do get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, and you can find me on Twitter @sentience. Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on this show and to subscribe to get every show automatically.
凯文：感谢您收听SitePoint播客。 如果您对今天的采访有任何想法或疑问，请保持联系。 你可以在Twitter上找到SitePoint @sitepointdotcom ，你可以找到我的Twitter @sentience 。 访问sitepoint.com/podcast对该节目发表评论并订阅以自动获得每一个节目。
We’ll be back next week with another news and commentary show with our usual panel of experts.
下周我们将与我们通常的专家小组一起再次发布新闻和评论节目。
The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker, and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now.
SitePoint播客由Carl Longnecker制作，我叫Kevin Yank。 暂时再见。
Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.
谢谢收听！ 欢迎使用下面的评论字段让我们知道我们的状况，或者继续讨论。
翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/podcast-23-web-fonts-with-jeff-veen/
