While FontFonts were already available thru TypeKit, FontShop International has now announced, that more than 30 of the most popular FontFont families are now available for download as so-called Web FontFonts, including FF DIN, FF Meta, FF Dax, and FF Kievit. This enables a more seamless and effective transition from print design to the web. An organization whose identity uses FF DIN, for example, can now deliver that experience on the web, using true HTML text.

Web FontFonts come as a download package with an EOT and a WOFF file. The official announcements states that this will cover “more than 90% of all web visitors”, but unfortunately at the moment this is marketing talk. WOFF is currently only available in the latest release of Firefox. If someone uses an older version or Safari or Opera, Web FontFonts won’t show up. I just contacted the major browser makers asking for their plans concerning WOFF, but no one is currently working on an implementation of this format. So we probably need to wait some time until this concept of WOFF and EOT (as an Internet Explorer fallback) will really take off. Nethertheless, WOFF has a very good chance of becoming the webfont format, so I really appreciate that FSI is taking the lead in supporting it.

The fonts are licensed based on the estimate number of page-views per month for the website. There are three levels: up to 500,000; up to 5 million; and up to 50 million. To me this sounds like a very reasonably deal.

A detailed user guide describes how you can link the fonts on your website. It is also important to mention that FSI’s webfonts are carefully optimized for screen. A regular desktop font converted to WOFF or EOT will very likely look terrible in smaller sizes on Windows. Only optimized screen fonts promise a good legibility across all platforms and in all sizes. The Web FontFonts certainly fulfill this promise. You can check it out by looking at the browser samples provided by Typekit.

The Web FontFonts are available for licensing here: http://www.fontshop.com/fontlist/n/web_fontfonts/