Typekit is a font delivery and licensing service which enables web designers to use a much wider range of fonts in website than had previously been available. It is a commercial service which web site owners and web designers can subscribe to if they need to use specialist fonts in their HTML content.

Until recently, the HTML design process has been limited to a small range of common fonts that could be guaranteed to be found on Windows, Mac and Linux machines.

It is technically possible to overcome this problem by delivering the font to the reader along with the web page, but this presents some other problems.

1. Different browsers require the fonts in different formats.
2. The font(s) have to be downloaded along with the page, making an initial visit to the site slower and therefore impacting on the user experience.
3. Licensing. While it is possible to upload a font to your web server to be used in your web pages, it may break the licensing terms for the use of that font.
4. As this is a relatively new phenomenon, not all fonts are necessarily optimised for screen display on the web.

Typekit resolves these problems and greatly broadens the range of fonts available by provide a selection of several hundred fonts, delivering the font to the browser in the most appropriate method for that particular web browser, providing a high speed network to minimise initial download times and eliminating the headache of having to deal with licensing issues by dealing with the font forgeries directly on your behalf.

Prior to the widespread availability of web fonts, designers had resorted to putting text into graphics or flash files where it was absolutely essential to use a particular font in order to adhere to company brand guidelines. This had the negative impact of making parts of the content of a web site inaccessible to people visually impaired people using a screen reader, search engines such as Google and Yahoo and on-site search and in the cases where flash was used, certain mobile devices such as the iphone.