A few decades ago, Adobe set off on changing the way how people worked with typography on a regular basis. Typekit is at the centre of their typography ‘revolution’, at least for the web. Started by a start-up Small Batch Inc. in 2009, and later acquired by Adobe in October 2011, it has now been designated as a part-software and part-services based platform.
However, thanks to an outage today, designers and artists were confronted with Arial or Georgia (read:yuck) font after a major infrastructural failure on Typekit’s backend.
Adobe later confirmed on it’s Typekit status page that the problem was related to their “storage provider”, who had suffered some sort of critical outage. The provider was said to be working on a fix, which by 12pm BST meant that service was largely restored for most users.
And who was the provider you ask ? Well, thats not know, but Amazon’s storage solutions also suffered a downtime at the same time. That could be related.
For those of you who are pretty far from anything related to web designing, Typekit is a service which allows subscribers to embed fonts into online documents and essentially rendering them beautiful and readable, facilitated by Cascading Style Sheets(CSS). It allows designers and developers a subscription-based library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on their websites at a meagre expense.
Typekit, available to the public under a single licensing library, has more than 700 font interfaces across various foundries.
It faces stiff competition from free alternatives like Google Fonts which was launched in 2011.
