Typography on the Web
Most businesses that have gone through a branding process will have a set of brand guidelines that include a logo, colour schemes and a selection of fonts. But when it's time to design the website, font options become very limited. Up until recently you only had a choice between sans-serif fonts like Arial and Verdana, or serif fonts like Georgia or Times New Roman. This was because web browsers require the specified font to exist on the visitors computer. Only a very small handful of fonts like Arial exist on every computer (and even this is not a given).
Wouldn't it be great to use your brand font?
With the release of new versions of web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox a new and very exciting possibility opens up. Web browsers have now started to implement CSS3 and HTML5 - these are the core languages that all websites are created with. CSS3 in particular includes the new @font-face rule. This rule basically allows fonts to be embedded into a website. Therefore visitors do not need to have that font installed on their computer to see it.
What does this mean?
In theory this means that we can now use any font (or more importantly your brand font) on a website. As always there is a catch. The big issue is font licensing. Most fonts are not free (even the fonts on your computer probably had their licenses paid for by Microsoft or Apple). If you embed a licensed font with @font-face onto your website visitors will download it temporarily onto their computer in order to see it. With the right know-how it's a simple exercise to then install that font for free, essentially stealing it. Because of this it is illegal to use licensed fonts on the web without explicit permission. Obviously due to the ease of file copying, font foundries are reluctant to allow this technique.
So if the technology exists but we can't use it then what's the point? Well there are plenty of free fonts around. Websites like Font Squirrel are indexing them for this purpose. Even Google are hosting them. It's worth noting that "free" doesn't necessarily mean low quality. The majority of non-free fonts are just awful! Though many particularly old font designs have already fallen into public domain and can be remade (League Gothic is an excellent example).
Of course, if your brand font is locked down by a license you're out of look. Last year IKEA took a bold step and changed their brand font from Futura to Verdana to create a consistency look from print to web (Verdana being one of the few universally available fonts). However using a very popular/generic font seems a big price to pay for a consistent but ultimately boring brand style.
A new kind of font file
The solution to the license issue is to create an embeddable font file that can only be viewed within the website confines without the possibility of it being stolen. WOFF (Web Open Font Format) has been proposed as the solution and is backed by many font foundries and browser developers. Some web browsers already support WOFF fonts.
But this solution is still not the end of the story. While it is possible to convert any font to WOFF you still need explicit permission to use WOFF. That would require new licenses or retroactive changes to old licenses. This relies on the owners (font foundries like Bitsream and Ascender) to make a move. And because their business is at stake they are in no rush to adopt change.