And We're Live! The New Fonts.com Comes Out of Beta

Last month, we debuted a new Fonts.com. Born out of a collaboration with the Happy Cog agency that began more than a year ago, the new design pairs a broad inventory of desktop and Web fonts with a bold, new aesthetic. Over the past few weeks, we've been testing and gathering feedback on the new site. Today we're pleased to bring it out of beta. The old site has been retired to make way for a Fonts.com that we believe delivers the best experience for finding type for use on the desktop or the Web.

Lots of Feedback

So what have we been up to over the past weeks since the new site's premier? First off, we've been listening. Thanks to everyone that has contributed thoughts to the Fonts.com feedback forum. Your feedback has helped us improve the site's stability and build out our roadmap with future UI enhancements and feature releases. We've also been improving the speed of the site – a process that will continue over the coming months.

New Logo For a New Design

Today also marks the debut of a new Fonts.com logo. While this may seem like a minor detail to some, others felt passionately that new site was deserving of a fresh logo. We agreed. As

Monotype Imaging and Fonts.com, we've serviced countless brands over the years, and it was time to care of our own. The previous logo, based on Helvetica Compressed, has served its purpose. The new logo is based off of the Harmonia Sans family – a design from Monotype Imaging's own Jim Wasco. Learn more about why we chose this typeface, the alterations we made and the process of refreshing the Fonts.com brand in an upcoming blog post with creative director Dennis Michael Dimos, who crafted the logo.

Easy Access to More Hand Tuned Web Fonts

Possibly our greatest area of focus during the beta has been on display quality of Web fonts. We set out to expand what was already the broadest selection of hand tuned fonts. We now offer more than 1,900 hand tuned fonts through our Standard and Professional subscriptions. Even our Free plan offers a generous selection of more than 400 hand tuned fonts.

Yet with a selection of more than 20,000 Web fonts, we also needed to introduce some methods to make the hand tuned designs easier to discover. First, we've added a Web Font Quality filter that can be used to refine any search results page. Simply select the Hand Tuned attribute from the Web Font Quality refinement attribute to narrow your results down to hand tuned.

We've also listed a font's level of Web font quality on its Web font product detail page. You'll notice that nearly every font will display as Screen Optimized or Hand Tuned. More on the difference between these two levels of quality in an upcoming post, but in short – screen optimized fonts go through a series of adjustments and techniques to enhance display quality and minimize file size. Hand Tuned fonts go through a similar process but with additional time from one of our typographic experts to ensure the ultimate in display quality. Lastly, look for the Recommended Use attribute on any Web font product detail page. Fonts are recommended for use at Paragraph (12 to 24 pixels) or Headline (24 pixels and above) sizes or both. Consider this a general guideline that may help you determine if a font will work well for a particular usage.

More Content and Imagery

Type enthusiasts may have also noticed more content. We've added imagery and histories to many new families and have expanded our new Fontology series with many additional articles. Check out the with the Levato typeface, how worked with the Novecento family and Dennis Michael Dimos's application of the Biome and Kat Tail typefaces.

Our Web fonts section now includes a tutorial to help acclimate new subscribers while aiding existing users who are making the transition to the new site. For Fonts.com Web Fonts subscribers not quite ready to make the move yet, we'll keep the old Fonts.com portal active for the time being. It can be accessed here.

New Tools for Trialing

We've also announced a couple of new font tools. Since the beta we've updated Fonts.com Web Fonts Extension for Adobe Photoshop – which allows you to preview our catalog of Web Fonts and your Fonts.com Web Fonts projects directly in Photoshop. Download this free beta or learn more.

The Work Continues

Just because we're out of beta, doesn't mean the work is done. We're working our way through the valuable feedback we've received, so expect numerous updates in the coming weeks to address your suggestions – along with a couple of surprises we've been working on. We'll continue to expand the imagery and description of our typefaces while expanding the educational resources found in Fontology. We also have big plans for our font tools. Since debuting FontGazer and the Fonts.com Web Fonts Extension for Adobe Photoshop, we can tell that "in-app font experimentation" is a concept of interest to both print and Web designers. We're hard at work improving these utilities, exploring other design applications to support and considering new ways to make font trialing even easier.

Is there anything else you'd like to see? Let us know. The Fonts.com feedback forum will remain active, so keep those suggestions coming!

Johnathan Zsittnik is the eCommerce Marketing Manager at Monotype Imaging. Johnathan holds both a bachelor's degree in marketing and a master's degree in business administration from Bentley University.