FontDeck : Java Glossary

A font supplier that lets you rent fonts for $2.50 USD to $7.50 USD per year. From a pricing point of view, they consider the bold, italic, italic-bold etc. as separate fonts. You can use them on your website. This price includes 1,000,000 monthly page-views per font. They will host fonts from other foundries, with that foundry’s permission, of course. This service is similar to Adobe Typekit.

They distribute fonts from many designers including Fabrizio Schiavi, the creator of PragmataPro and the legendary Adrian Frutiger.

How Does It Work

Unlike Typekit, FontDeck does not use any JavaScript or browser detection. It works by including a line something like this in the header:

It loads a small style sheet with @font-face commands in it to tell the browser how to load the additional fonts off the FontDeck server.

Unfortunately, you cannot use these rented fonts in Applets and Java Web Start applications.

I particularly liked Jeremy Tankard’s Aspect. It is a quite expensive font, $18.75 USD per year for each of the five variants. You don’t have to buy all five.

Another font that appeals is Hermann Zapf’s Classico, an Optima variant. It is $12.50 USD per year for each of the seven variants. According to the FontDeck website, it was created in 1990, but strangely Ken Keyes published a book,  Handbook To Higher Consciousness in 1975 that uses a typeface that looks just like it.

We don’t create heroic things to earn fame. We put no scratches on the globe, but perhaps with our gentle art we add a few little dabs of joy to life, in a nicely written praise of the Lord, written with the complete engagement of our heart. Calligraphy is a peaceful and noble art, done by well educated human beings who do their work with full commitment, with intense concentration. For we want to put into our letters a little of our own feelings, of our personality and mood. Letters should have grace and beauty in themselves. No calligrapher pollutes rivers with his ink, or poisons the air we breathe. Calligraphy makes no noise. We don’t fight with arms nor with our pens, but we want to convince sometimes with a hand-lettered message of special importance in which we believed. Of course we know we are not the center of the world — we merely like to make nice things with our given talent. And we have a burden of responsibility: the heritage of the great masters of the past, the tradition of the scribes of the Middle Ages, of the royal and imperial ancestors in Europe and Asia. Calligraphy is still a royal activity.
~ Hermann Zapf (born: 1918-11-08 age: 93), famous font designer