Techy? Sometimes. Funny? Often. Relevant? Always.

Web designers have long been groaning for better font options on the web. Most have been stuck with a limited selection of typefaces to ensure compatibility across multiple browsers and operating systems.

Over the past few years multiple methods have been created to bring more refined typography to the web and it seems like there’s a new font replacement technique released every week. However, none have have showed the promise that Typekit boasts of.

sIFR works across the widest range of browsers currently, but it’s a pain to set up. Cufon is easy to set up, but very few foundries license their fonts for web embedding in this way as it’s possible someone could reverse engineer the process and garner a copy of the embedded font for personal use. @font-face is standards compliant, but it’s being adopted slowly and also faces the protection problems that font foundries are wary of.

If Typekit delivers as promised, it’ll take the best of these methods and solve all of the cons as well. It’s standards compliant, lightweight, and cross-browser compatible (even IE!). Most importantly, it’s going to be backed by solid type foundries so we’re sure to get some quality faces.

While this will be a huge advancement for designers, it also has benefits for the users as well. Websites can now be more consist with brand guidelines while still remaining accessible to devices like mobile phones which don’t have Flash support (which is what sIFR uses). Also, a larger font selection allows for better-suited type to be used for each situation. As much as we all love Times, there are far better options for readability sake alone!

I think Typekit will also urge foundries to create better quality screen fonts for use on the web. Web licenses for these typefaces will likely be more affordable, so it’s possible that it could even become a huge market for the foundries! Look for more details as they become available on Typekit’s blog.