Adobe and Typekit

When the news first hit that Adobe was acquiring Typekit, I thought it was a joke. And there were plenty of jokes made on Twitter, mostly born of users’ fears that Adobe would ruin a good thing. To me it was akin to hearing that one of my favorite underground bands was suddenly scooped up by a major label: things could get bigger and better, but it could also mean a loss of vision and direction. The last thing I wanted was for one of my favorite services to turn into just another marketing bullet point for the latest Creative Suite release (Adobe CS Ocho: Now With More Typekit!).

Once I got over the initial shock, however, I wrote this on Twitter:

I think the @typekit acquisition says more about @adobe changing than the reverse.

I started to see this as a sign that Adobe had stopped living in the past and was starting to move to where its users were already headed. For the past several years it has seemed like Adobe had stopped innovating: content to make incremental changes (I was going to write “upgrades” but there’s folks who would disagree with that) to their core products, while seemingly blind to the rapid change that was taking place all around them. The explosion of mobile platforms was marked by a very public Apple/Adobe back-and-forth over why Flash wasn’t allowed on iOS. That war of words obscured the simple fact that Adobe plain missed the boat with mobile.

With this Typekit move, however, Adobe seems to have realized that they needed to start innovating again, or do the next best thing: find someone who will innovate and partner with them. I say “partner” because that’s what it sounds like. From the Typekit blog post on the acquisition (emphasis mine):

If you’re one of our customers, this announcement means things will only get better. Typekit will remain a standalone product, as well as become a vital part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Our team will stay together, and we’re excited to start working on even easier ways to integrate web fonts into your workflow.

Those two bits I highlighted are what give me hope that this thing could work. The Typekit team includes some very forward-thinking folks that I admire: Jeffrey Veen, Mandy Brown, Jason Santa Maria, among others. I heard Jeffrey Veen speak at An Event Apart this past year, and my overriding impression was this: the guy is extremely focused on his users. The Typekit team has their users’ trust, something they’ve built not just with the service itself but with years of giving to the web design community. I find it hard to believe that they would make a move that was either cynical or naive. I just think they’re smart people who care too much to let that happen.

This move alone doesn’t address the other nagging issues I have with Adobe, but it does show that someone over there understands where things are headed. As for the effect it might have on Typekit, I’m hoping that with Adobe’s clout we’ll see more and more type foundries add their fonts to Typekit, and also see Typekit integrated into more and more platforms.

Finally, there’s this: a lot of designers still don’t know about Typekit, but you’d be hard pressed to find a designer that doesn’t know Adobe. If this acquisition does nothing more than expose a whole slew of designers to the new opportunities afforded by web fonts, then that’s good enough for me.