The breakdown of the Typekit Web platform in 2015, one of the major streaming services making it possible to download fonts onto Web pages, gave rise to a minor panic (known as the “Fontpocalypse”), by changing the look of(or “defacing” in the jargon) many websites. 11 Michael Rundle, “Typekit Down: this is why the Web suddenly looks so ugly,” Wired (August 10, 2015). [Online] http://b-o.fr/typekit-down This situation reveals a significant development in the Web’s history, and in the history of digital fonts, with their use subsequently becoming more reliant on a third party. This problem is not just technical, and, in passing, has changed the very nature of typography, whose task has been to transmit meaning in writing since the mid-15th century.
The Dialectic of Form
The Web was invented to exchange digital documents, which were conceived as structured data. 22 Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist, invented the Web at the CERN in 1989. See: http://b-o.fr/berners-lee They were not formatted at the outset, as in the Gutenberg and Marconi 33 Famous expressions used by Marshall McLuhan to describe the world of the printed document and the “broadcast” audio-visual world in: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). “galaxies,” but rather upon arrival, on the recipient’s screen, by means of a parser (which would later become a browser). 44 The first website and one or two definitions are always accessible online. Voir/See: http://b-o.fr/web It must be said that transmitting a document by computer is no simple feat due to the closed nature of the file formats and the fact that fonts are essential resources for the smooth working of the operating system. Digital fonts are likened to software packages, and subject to user licenses which, since the early days of desktop publishing (DTP), have been offering their purchasers an installation on a specific number of posts. It is not possible to distribute them on a Web server without a special license. This would be akin to counterfeiting. Thus, the problem is both technical and legal.
The history of the Web is all about the slow graphic improvement of digital documents. Everything is motivatived by the need to get around this complication: using the most widespread fonts, the Webfonts proposed by the Internet Explorer browser (Verdana, Georgia); the font stack, a list of font requests in decreasing order of specificity; the insertion of images that represent words (!); and even the recourse to Flash animations which reassemble the page, letter by letter, just as a typographic composer would do, without nevertheless distributing the font. 55 In 2004, Mike Davidson came up with the SiFR “solution” as a rather cunning compromise between usability and appearance. See: http://b-o.fr/sifr
A Missed Appointment
When, at long last, Web standards and browsers made it possible to associate, disseminate, load and activate fonts within them, by means of CSS style sheets, 66 The CSS2 recommendation of 1998 already offered this possibility, but it would be a long time before it became effective (late 2000s). it was a tad too late, because the Web had also changed since the read/write utopia that postulated that every reader is potentially a writer. Start-ups have benefited from this typographic weak spot by becoming “facilitators” (paid go-betweens) between the Web designer, the text and the reader, offering to disseminate fonts (with CSS), but also protecting them and remunerating them for their use (bandwidth), with each page read being invoiced at the moment of the transmission of the typographic glyphs from their server. This is known as font streaming.
Streaming has spread fast due to its threefold promise: it enabled the allocation of royalties to font producers, protected them from piracy, and made websites more attractive (which no longer required anything miraculous, technically speaking) by being on good terms with foundries (which did involve something a bit more miraculous). However, while improving the graphic format of their productions, designers were involuntarily contributing to unravelling the online document and further altering the way the typographic character functions.
The Typographic Double Meaning
The form of a Web page thus produced (streamed) depends on a central service which disseminates the characters. This risk was revealed by the Fontpocalypse (breakdown of the Typekit service) of 2015. Consequently, the page is reliant on the temporary contract between the publisher and the streamer who programs its obsolescence. It can no longer be stored in its entirety and will thus not find its way into the document’s history. The typography, which was meant to be available for the transmission of the text and its inclusion in a medium, becomes the very thing that contributes to undoing it, just as acid paper ends up eating away at the very books that contain it.
Another problem is that the use of the document is permanently monitored. A streamed font becomes a tracker that makes it possible to know, in a centralized way, who is reading what and when, both for advertising purposes and other reasons. Digital typography here switches its nature, which is something that not all those involved in this sector have perhaps noticed: from a one-way sign, it has become a two-way track for information. It is no longer the servant of meaning, from the author to the reader, but henceforth informs in the other direction. It is what is called a data collector, and one to be reckoned with, into the bargain. This change is essential.
All this helps to explain the vast upsurge of free fonts. The Web, which has, to some degree, retained its spirit of openness, universality and ongoing permanence, has turned considerably towards open typographic resources, or those authorizing online dissemination, even if the confusion between free/open source/no charge has also encouraged mediocre creations, or substitutes, or, worse, free Google Fonts streamed from the colossus’s servers… in a nutshell, publicity. The gargantuan Web has swiftly apprehended the challenge behind the minor economy of streaming, and its interest in the surveillance of web surfers. It has done so by shaking up the established order (like a disruptor) by the introduction of no charge/free use. In tandem, streaming is now being generalized outside the Web towards desktop publishing applications and typography is for hire (the FontStand.com service, for example, is proposing to hire out one typography per month).
Typography, for its part, has not emerged unscathed from this turmoil, because it has changed its nature by becoming that “two-way track,” even if it still includes many aware and attentive players, present on the Web. If they probably cannot shift completely into reverse, because the change is far-reaching and systemic, perhaps they will manage to find conscious and useful uses, associated with this new nature.