Solving the Challenges of Asian Web Fonts Monotype’s Bill Davis was honored to give a presentation at the ATypI Hong Kong 2012 Conference titled “Solving the Challenges of Asian Web Fonts.” When he looked at the top 1000 websites, he found that 10 to 15 percent are already using Web fonts. But for East Asian languages and scripts, only a handful has started to deploy Web fonts. His AtypI presentation, provided here as a slideshare, examines the two primary challenges for developers of Asian websites: 1) Website design issues and 2) Asian Web font file sizes. His experience with the broad range of language and script support available in Fonts.com Web Fonts service has allowed him to gain insights into early adoption of non-Latin and Asian Web fonts by Web designers and developers. This slideshare reviews some of the main benefits of Web fonts, no matter the language or geographic market for your audience, are: • Establish typographic consistency • Improve user experience • Eliminate the use of text as graphics, improve workflow • Enhance SEO, accessibility To learn more about Web fonts, check out Bill Davis’ Fonts.com blog at http://blog.fonts.com/contributors/bill-davis For more information on Fonts.com Web Font Services, check out http://www.fonts.com/web-fonts

1. Solving the
Challenges of
Asian Web Fonts
Bill Davis
ATypI Hong Kong

2. Why use Web fonts?
Establish typographic consistency
Improve user experience
Eliminate graphics, improve workflow
Enhance SEO, accessibility

3. Technology Adoption Curve
Web fonts in 10-15% of top 1000 websites
Latin fonts

4. Alternative to Web fonts
Use
“System Fonts”

5. Global Typographic Consistency?
Site using branding fonts and system fonts

6. Global Typographic Consistency?
Sans serif fonts replaced with mincho and gothic styles

7. Web fonts are easy!
You simply use CSS to define your fonts:
{font-family: “MyCustom Font", "Hiragino Kaku
Gothic", Osaka, "MS PGothic", Arial, sans-serif;}
The fonts can be located:
 Local
 Downloaded
 Linked to a Web font service

8. Leading Web font services
 Google.com/webfonts 554 font families
 Typekit.com 776 font families
 Fonts.com 2000 + font families
 WebInk.com 993 + font families
 FontDeck.com 992 font families
 Webtype.com 70 + font families
 Typotheque.com 55 font families

9. Primarily Latin-based fonts
 Google.com/webfonts Cyrillic, Khmer, Vietnamese
“earlyaccess” Arabic, Indic, Korean +
 Typekit.com Cyrillic +
 Fonts.com Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
Cyrillic, Indic, Vietnamese, +
 WebInk.com Cyrillic, Vietnamese +
 FontDeck.com Arabic, Cyrillic +
 Webtype.com Greek, Cyrillic +
 Typotheque.com Arabic, Indic, Cyrillic +

10. Web fonts adoption
Asian fonts

11. Asian Web font services
Japan: Korea:
 Typesquare.com
(Morisawa) China:
 Fontplus.jp  justFont.com
 Dekomoji.jp
 amanaimages.com
 Mojidepa.com

12. So what’s the challenge?
Site Design
 Text-heavy websites
 System fonts are tuned for small sizes
 Web fonts benefit headlines
 HTML5 – Flash replacement

17. Text size matters!
Test your Web fonts!

19. So what’s the challenge?
Asian font file sizes
 Download times
 File Compression/Subsetting techniques
 Mobile users

20. More Smartphones than PCs

21. File download speeds
2mb file
 256kb DSL 1 minute 1 second
 3Mbs (4G) 5 seconds
5mb file
 256kb DSL 2 minutes 33 seconds
 3Mbs (4G) 12 seconds

22. File size matters!
Test your Web fonts!

23. Asian font subsetting
Pre-subsetting or Dynamic subsetting
 Build custom fonts for each web page
 Smaller font files
 Offered by Web font services

24. Multi-national
companies are
starting to
deploy Web fonts

28. This is the year
non-Latin and
Asian Web fonts
takes off!

29. Thank You!
謝謝
Bill Davis
bill@fonts.com
Typefaces used: Akko™ designed by Akira Kobayashi, 2011