I would say, if you want to take your sites typography to the next level... pay for a font library.
That was the theory, but I'm still waiting to be convinced about it in practice. I check in on all of the major rent-a-font services from time to time, and I'm rarely impressed by their results.
Consider TypeKit's home page. Personally I would not consider some of the fonts and typography they use themselves to be acceptable for professional work.
For example, they're currently using Adobe Clean for a lot of the text, but it has more hinting glitches than an excited child the week before their birthday. They get away with it -- up to a point -- because many visitors probably still have a default browser font size of 16px, but if your default is a bit larger or you zoom the page, the text rendering is awful. (Actually, their whole layout breaks if you set your default font size a bit larger, but that's a separate problem.)
Notice how in the font showcase section, under "THE BEST ARE ON TYPEKIT", all the examples are actually screenshots and almost exclusively of very large text? What happens if you actually look at the samples of a popular Adobe font, say Minion Pro, which they feature there? Well, in tests based on TypeKit's own specimen screen, 3 out of 3 main Windows browsers render it with nasty weighting issues, and even significant gaps in the letter forms in narrow areas. This isn't a problem with either Minion Pro or the hardware I'm using to display it; it renders just fine at the same physical size in InDesign or Adobe Reader. It's a problem with Minion Pro served as a web font by TypeKit.
The quality of web fonts from Cloud.Typography generally seems to be better, but again, even their own home page shows plenty of fonts that either appear blurry or have hinting problems and appear with uneven line weights, uneven spacing, counters closing up, etc. The blurring might be acceptable to Apple users who are used to that style of rendering, but unless your target audience doesn't include anyone who uses other platforms, it's going to look very odd to a lot of people. The other hinting glitches might be unavoidable results of trying to render fonts designed for print faithfully on screen, but they are glitches all the same.
I just don't understand why anyone who cares about the quality of their work would voluntarily choose these options, and pay for them, when you can have similar or better looking rendering for free with native system fonts on most platforms these days and with several of the standards from Google Fonts if you want a change.
That was the theory, but I'm still waiting to be convinced about it in practice. I check in on all of the major rent-a-font services from time to time, and I'm rarely impressed by their results.
Consider TypeKit's home page. Personally I would not consider some of the fonts and typography they use themselves to be acceptable for professional work.
For example, they're currently using Adobe Clean for a lot of the text, but it has more hinting glitches than an excited child the week before their birthday. They get away with it -- up to a point -- because many visitors probably still have a default browser font size of 16px, but if your default is a bit larger or you zoom the page, the text rendering is awful. (Actually, their whole layout breaks if you set your default font size a bit larger, but that's a separate problem.)
Notice how in the font showcase section, under "THE BEST ARE ON TYPEKIT", all the examples are actually screenshots and almost exclusively of very large text? What happens if you actually look at the samples of a popular Adobe font, say Minion Pro, which they feature there? Well, in tests based on TypeKit's own specimen screen, 3 out of 3 main Windows browsers render it with nasty weighting issues, and even significant gaps in the letter forms in narrow areas. This isn't a problem with either Minion Pro or the hardware I'm using to display it; it renders just fine at the same physical size in InDesign or Adobe Reader. It's a problem with Minion Pro served as a web font by TypeKit.
The quality of web fonts from Cloud.Typography generally seems to be better, but again, even their own home page shows plenty of fonts that either appear blurry or have hinting problems and appear with uneven line weights, uneven spacing, counters closing up, etc. The blurring might be acceptable to Apple users who are used to that style of rendering, but unless your target audience doesn't include anyone who uses other platforms, it's going to look very odd to a lot of people. The other hinting glitches might be unavoidable results of trying to render fonts designed for print faithfully on screen, but they are glitches all the same.
I just don't understand why anyone who cares about the quality of their work would voluntarily choose these options, and pay for them, when you can have similar or better looking rendering for free with native system fonts on most platforms these days and with several of the standards from Google Fonts if you want a change.