Bill Davis

Opinion: Why Ascender's Fonts Live service is doomed from the get-go (Download Squad)

Jul 8th 2010 3:34PM Erez, I am with Ascender, the developers of the http://www.fontslive.com/ web font service. It made me happy to read the comments from the others here who don't share your opinion. I think they captured the key values that a commercial web font service like FontsLive offers web designers & developers: premium quality commercial fonts, offered in a convenient and affordable service.

The market for web fonts is brand new, and will most certainly evolve quickly over time. For professional designers and developers, the pricing model we have come up has received a lot of positive comments. It all comes down to the perceived value of the service we are offering.

We have developed a flexible platform that addresses the full range of users, from bloggers to the web's largest websites. FontsLive offers both hosted web fonts and a self-hosted option: each with the convenience of generating the web font files and CSS stacks in a manner that eases implementation and addresses browser changes/version differences.

But most importantly, what web designers and developers are most interested is improving the typography of their sites. And to this point, the quality of the font rendering across platforms & browsers is critical. That is one of the most important differentiators of a service like FontsLive. All our fonts are hand-tuned by our font experts, led by Tom Rickner (who is well-renowned for the hinting work he's done on Verdana & Georgia and countless other system fonts that make up the 'web safe' fonts everyone uses today).

Is FontsLive doomed from the get-go? Based on the comments above and our early success with a wide variety of customers I hardly think so. Only time will tell who's opinion is right.