Why Fontdeck is Retiring
We have taken the difficult decision to close Fontdeck.
We’re extremely proud of what we’ve achieved over the past 6 years in terms of bringing wonderful fonts to the web, but sadly the time has come to say goodbye. As of 1 December 2015 won’t be accepting any new accounts, project upgrades, or font purchases. We’ll continue to serve fonts until 1 December 2016.
Great Expectations
Fontdeck was conceived by Jon Tan and Richard Rutter in 2009 and resulted in a joint venture between Clearleft and OmniTI, funded entirely by the two companies. Our mission was to create a service that would bring high quality fonts to a wide audience, and provide a level playing field for independent typeface designers to compete with large foundries, and set prices themselves. It needed to be easy to use while providing the flexibility professional web designers require.
Looking back on our mission, we achieved our goals. Fontdeck helped show web designers how and why webfonts would change the web as we know it, and we were influential in convincing type designers that the web was a viable new marketplace for their work. Without Fontdeck, even now the web might not be seeing webfonts from such wonderful foundries as Fontsmith, Colophon, Jeremy Tankard and A2-Type.
Fontdeck was self-sustaining financially, but it was run by staff from within OmniTI and Clearleft. The number of customers we had continued to grow throughout our time and that was the reason we were still going after 6 years (not so many dotcom startups can say that). But with increased customers there is of course the increased running and support overhead. OmniTI and Clearleft are service and design companies and running a product alongside our client work proved to be difficult. But we believed in the service we were offering so we stuck at it despite it being a burden at times.
However, since webfonts became a commercial viability in 2009 the landscape has changed. Professional web designers - which we count ourselves among - now demand and need more. More speed, more tailoring of fonts, case-by-case subsetting, specifying OpenType features, hinting only where necessary, WOFF2, flexible pricing options, and more besides. As a webfont service we felt it was incumbent upon us to be providing all this to our paying customers, and as web designers we felt this was the kind of service we should be receiving. This is where our decision to retire Fontdeck lay.
Fontdeck could tick along as it was, but without significant investment we wouldn’t be able to improve the infrastructure or the features of our service. Fontdeck would eventually stagnate as our well funded competition gradually improved their services. That’s not something we wanted to happen. As neither OmniTI nor Clearleft have the resources to take Fontdeck to the next level, we had no desire to traipse around the Valley with a begging bowl; instead we took the decision to retire Fontdeck rather than let it wither on the vine.
Doing the Right Thing
We know that closing Fontdeck will inconvenience many people: we have thousands of paying customers (including household brands) and dozens of foundry partners, many of whom use Fontdeck exclusively. From the very beginning we have tried to do the right thing, so by keeping the fonts going for another 12 months (at no additional charge to existing customers) we hope to be giving everyone the opportunity to find other sources of their fonts, either through another service or reseller, or directly from the foundry.
Thank You
Thank you for supporting Fontdeck and our foundry partners over the past 6 years. We’re proud to have been a part of the webfont revolution, and we look forward to seeing how web typography will grow and develop in the future.