Renowned type foundry H&FJ (Hoefler & Frere-Jones) has launched Cloud.typography, calling it the “web font solution for design professionals”.
The company said its solution “takes the guesswork out of using fonts online” by redesigning for screen “one of the world’s most sophisticated type libraries,” ensuring everything is engineered to always be readable. ScreenSmart font technology is said to remove the guesswork inherent in fonts that weren’t designed to anticipate the pixel, resulting in precise results at any size.
H&FJ also said the entirely CSS solution is “simple to set up, painless to integrate with your existing site, and designed to grow with you from development through production”. Pricing begins at $99 per year for 250,000 page views per month.
Immediately after the announcement, industry figures quickly enthused about the new service. “Today, beautiful type on the web takes its next giant leap forward,” said Mike Davidson, vice president of design at Twitter.
“The quality of these @H_FJ webfonts is off the charts. Points out the failings of many popular webfonts today,” thought web designer Joni Korpi.
Speaking to .net, designer Laura Kalbag was similarly impressed with what she saw: “It’s been a long time in coming, but it’s for good reason. H&FJ produce some of the most beautiful typefaces and have been taking their time to ensure they’re properly hinted, displaying in the most optimised way possible, for the web.”
Designer Dan Mall was similarly enthusiastic: "The web could always use more great typography, and H&FJ makes some of the most beautiful typefaces around. I'm really glad to see that more designers and developers will have easy access to using these great faces on the web."
