Customize your blog with Typekit fonts

Looking for a way to give your blog a new look? A well-designed font can help give your blog personality, and help it stand out in the crowd.  We've partnered with Typekit, a great new company that's bringing professional fonts to the web, to help you integrate Typekit fonts into your TypePad Unlimited blog...and bring you a discount on their services!

  

Typekit is a subscription-based service that takes advantage of new capabilities in modern web browsers to bring high-quality, fully licensed fonts to your blog -- even if your readers don't have those fonts installed on their computers.  For example, check out what these great TypePad bloggers have done with Typekit...

  

Typekit offers hundreds fonts from world-renowned foundries like FontFont, ps.type.lab, Chank!, fonthead, Mark Simonson and more.  There's bound to be one there that will help you spruce up your blog.

To get started, create a Typekit account.  Their Trial plan is free, and gives you access to more than 100 popular Typekit fonts.  Their paid pricing plans start at $7 a month, give you many more fonts to choose from, let you embed more fonts on your site...and Typekit's offering an annual pricing discount for TypePad bloggers.

Once you have a Typekit account, we've made it easy for you to connect your TypePad blog to your Typekit account -- so that you don't have to worry about copy and pasting JavaScript or inserting code into your templates.  To configure Typekit on your blog, log in to TypePad, select your blog and click the "Settings" tab.  Select "Add-ons" from the left navigation menu, and you'll see "Typekit Fonts" and a place to add your Typekit Kit ID.  Then in Typekit's Kit editor, you can choose the CSS classes on your blog that will have custom fonts.

We're excited to see how you use it!

Comments

[Kofla Olivieri]

Sounds great, but don't see the point of paying another fee in addition to my Pro account.

[Carlos Gutierrez]

I'm don't understand how to configure it in the Typekit's editor. Can you be more specific?

Thanks

[Mark Simmons]

Hello, Kofla.

Some designers wanted more control over their font that only a service like Typekit can provide so we made it as easy as possible for them. Don't worry, this is a completely optional service.

[Carlos Gutierrez]

My bad. I know now. :P

[hewn & hammered]

There's a free trial of typekit that lets you use 2 fonts on a single blog for free - it works quite well, although you only have access to a small part of Typekit's huge (and growing) library.

Of course, this is only really useful to you if you AND your audience appreciate typography and design; for some blogs, it's totally unnecessary, but I think many people will appreciate the option.

[Account Deleted]

Send us a note at [email protected] and we'll give you a hand. We've got some optimizations coming soon to make it easier.

[Lisa @ Boondock Ramblings]

I don't get it....how do you get it to work?

[Account Deleted]

I'm really glad to see you all implement this. I noticed that this was available at WordPress.com, and I wondered if Six Apart was going to do something like this for TypePad users. Typekit is a really cool feature for bloggers who opt in for it, and it's cool that you're able to give TypePad bloggers a discount on it.

[New Hope Homeowners Hotline]

Going to need a hand with this one.
How much interest can I find at this table...

[Lisa @ Boondock Ramblings]

Help...me too...I'm serious. How do you embed the code, etc? There are NO tutorials or explanations on this so it is great your partnered with them, but hello....how do we use it?

[Account Deleted]

We've got a help page with some troubleshooting tips here:

http://typekit.com/help/typepad

[Geo]

If the CSS supported the @font rule users could do this for free and not pay $7 in addition to the $14.95 pro. Yes, I know it's only an option, but it's a costly option where there are free alternatives that can achieve the same thing.

[Carlos Gutierrez]

I just did it!

www.conectado.vg and www.thewiredblog.com

There is a world of fonts with you. ;)

[Mark Simmons]

We're glad to see folks are interested in trying out Typekit. You can check out their help, http://typekit.com/help/typepad, and we're working on a Knowledge Base article. We'll try and get it out by the end of the week.

(If you want immediate help with Typekit on TypePad, you can also contact our Support team from the Help area.)

[Mark Simmons]

Thanks, H&H. Your blog looks great.

[Account Deleted]

You're right, Geo. The @font-face rule is a standard way to put fonts on your site. We built Typekit to help out with that for two reasons:

1. Most fonts don't include web use in their licensing. You can certainly link to a font from your blog's CSS, but it's likely a violation of the end user license.

2. There are many browser support issues you'll need to worry about. Currently, we serve EOT files to Internet Explorer, the new WOFF format for Firefox 3.6, and a protected version of OpenType to other browsers. Plus, each version is optimized to display as clearly as possible. That's a lot of work for most blog owners to do.

Try out our free trial and let me know what you think.

[Geo]

This sounds really great, but I don't anticipate trying out the feature. I've tried for about a year to get answers about custom fonts (and other concerns) from TypePad and my queries go thoroughly unanswered so I pretty much stopped banging my head against the wall of silence. Of course using the @font rule is only an option I threw out there, and would obviously only use properly licensed fonts or open source material. However I have not ever been able to have access to my blog's full template despite being a Pro user so the point is really moot at this stage. Thanks for the response though.

[Leah Culver]

I've written up a blog post with more details on adding a custom font with some screenshots: http://blog.leahculver.com/2010/02/typekit-fonts-on-typepad.html

I hope it helps!!

[Shannan Sinclair]

Okay just discovered this fun little gem!!! Total FAN!