Font Services Overview

Websentia offers Font Services using the state of the industry software from Fontlab, LTD. We use Fontlab Studio, Fontographer, TransType, and ScanFont. We can work from your design criteria or from native files of any of those software applications.

What is it that We Do?

Websentia does not serve as a font foundry, per se, as there are so many highly regarded font creators making up a respectable profession and a craft that cannot be easily made better. Rather, Websentia’s Font Services target specific needs that fonts can serve to fulfill. It may be helpful to read on, to understand what fonts are, what they do, and who is best at fulfilling your needs. But to start, here is a short list of what we do:

• Custom fonts
• Font conversions and font-type updates
• Web-fonts (for embedding in web pages)
• Handwriting replication and signatures
• Wing-ding-ology – logos, trade-mark symbols, special-use symbols such as for mathematics, map-making, or music applications

The Legal Side of Fonts – a Disclaimer

The fonts that we encounter daily are actually software and are usually protected by copyright and include copyright and usage information embedded into the font itself. While we all are accustomed to having a wide range of fonts at our disposal, this doesn’t mean we can do anything we want with them. In fact, it is highly likely that anyone reading this page has already exceeded the stated limits of usage of one or more fonts.

Websentia will review all font service requests  with this in mind and advise to help you achieve your goal using a strategy that respects the legal rights of any font creators. Although we strive to act responsibly, we cannot take responsibility for your use of any font we have worked on.

I have a font and I want to know how I can use it…

If you can send us a font, we can send you back the copyright information stored in it. We can also advise you on options to consider to achieve your intended purposes. Many times there are options that will work for you very well, while adhering to the copyrights of the font creator.

Embedding Fonts Into Your Website

Recent technologies allow for the embedding of fonts into a website. This allows for styling of your web pages in ways that once were only available in printed media or by using images. Embedding the font of your liking can give you a look you are after and still allow the search engines and accessibility readers to access the content of your website. There might be a slight decrease in speed of the loading of your pages and you also may have extra costs associated with using specified webfonts, but there are many choices of free services that widen the possibilities for presentation on your web pages. Did you know that you are reading an embedded font right now? Here are some options you can take advantage of:

Embed Fonts from a Font Service

This is the easiest way to use embedded webfonts.  Google Webfonts offers a large selection of fonts that you can embed either directly from their servers or from your own website. These are currently offered at no charge. There are paid services such as those offered by Fonts.Com or TypeKit.

Embed Fonts from Font Files Within Your Own Website

Websentia can convert your fonts (if not restricted by copyright) to embeddable webfonts or you may use the online webfont generator service available at FontSquirrel.Com. (They also ask that you affirm that there are no restrictions of use on the fonts you choose to convert.) When you use you own downloaded or converted files from within your own website, you avoid any downtime or slow response from other servers that are outside your site. This method is a little more painstaking and may add to your initial costs but offers the most control and safety from unforeseen service failures.

MyFonts.Com offers fonts and embeddable webfonts for sale from a number of vendors. Oftentimes, these webfonts are really “leased” for a specified number of page views (either total page views or page views per month). Please read carefully the usage stipulations when you purchase a font to use in a website. If you have questions, please contact us and we may be able to clarify your issues.

Custom Font Design

We will now explore the world of custom font design. While we may own hundreds of fonts that came to us with little or no effort, you must understand that there is a huge amount of work that goes into the making of a font. First, there is the design itself–a huge and artful undertaking. How does each letter or number look and how do they fit together into a cohesive whole that naturally fits together, is attractive to see, AND easy to read. WEBSENTIA DOES NOT DO THIS! Or at least, it is not our profession. There are already many, many choices for an attractive and functional font. What we do is create a special font for a specific use. An example would be a replication of historic printed material from the mid 16th century Spanish, French, and English printing establishments.

Another example would be the replication of a person’s handwriting. Another hard fact of life accompanying this endeavor is that a computer will never really look like hand-scribbling as there are so many nuances to the human’s lack of consistency that really becomes an integral part of the overall character. Hard fact of life number two is that cursive handwriting is a lot more work to reproduce than “printing” is.

Logos, Trademarks, and Signatures

It is possible to offer quick insertion of simple company logos, trademarks, or even official signatures that are included as characters within a custom font.