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A font farewell to Fontdeck as website service closes

It’s that, or ‘stagnate as competition improves’

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 US.

Customers can preview fonts and purchase them for use in their web designs. Fonts are served dynamically from the Fontdeck website, which means that when the site closes, default fonts will be substituted if customers have not migrated to another service: not good.

The reason given for Fontdeck's closure is that too much investment was needed in order to keep the service up to date.

What was needed? Well, "more speed, more tailoring of fonts, case-by-case subsetting, specifying OpenType features, hinting only where necessary, WOFF2, flexible pricing options, and more besides", said Fontdeck.

"Without significant investment we wouldn’t be able to improve the infrastructure or the features of our service," it added, and "Fontdeck would eventually stagnate as our well-funded competition gradually improved their services."

WOFF2 (Web Open Font Format 2) is a new W3C standard font packaging format with better compression.

Fontdeck suggests that customers either license fonts for self-hosting, or move to an alternative service. A migration chart lists such services where available, mainly Fontspring, YouWorkForThem, or Adobe's Typekit.

During the migration period fonts will be served at no additional charge to existing customers.

Jeffrey Zeldman tweets about Fontdeck closure

Jeffrey Zeldman tweets about Fontdeck closure

While the closure shows the risk of taking dependencies on externally served fonts, the community has responded favourably to the way the business is handling the closure. "Very sad Fontdeck is closing," tweets designer Jeffrey Zeldman, "but love the transparent, customer-focused way they're doing it."®

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