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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.

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Fontdeck closure support

Retirement dates

We have made the difficult decision to retire Fontdeck. We will continue to serve fonts until 1 December 2016. We are not accepting any new accounts, project upgrades, or font purchases as of 1 December 2015.

Fonts will stop being served on 1 December 2016.

Migrating your web fonts

We recommend that you either license and self-host the fonts yourself or use another webfont service, well before 1 December 2016. We hope that 12 months notice will give you plenty of time to do so.

All of our foundry partners are now making their webfonts available for self-hosting, or through other services such as Typekit. We have put together a migration chart showing where you can get webfont licenses for each of our foundry partners.

Project renewals and charges

We have automatically extended your annual license at no extra cost, until the service retires on 1 December 2016. This means projects will not need to renew in the next twelve months, and no further payments will be taken from your account (unless you have an enterprise supplement).

If you have just paid to renew your project, you can still have at least one full year of webfont delivery.

Your credit card details will be retained until the closure date, at which point all credit card data we will purge all credit card data from our system. If you close your account before 1 December 2016, your card data will be purged at the point you close your account.

Enterprise supplements

No money will be taken for annual renewals, however we will continue to charge you for enterprise supplements until you cancel, or the service ends.

Any credit you have in your account will continue to be applied to your monthly supplement charges.

Account administration and project settings

You can still administer your account, including changing email address or password, viewing past invoices and deleting websites. You will also be able to change billing details if you are using enterprise supplements.

From 1 December 2015 you will not be able to create new website projects or upgrade existing ‘development’ websites to ‘live’. You will continue to be able to add and delete domains from all development and live websites, but you will not be able to add new fonts to any websites.

Account closure

You can close your account at any time by clicking ‘Close account’ link at the bottom of the Account details page in your account settings.

[rich-fontdeck]

Bienvenue à Typofonderie

We’re delighted to announce that Typofonderie has joined Fontdeck.

Jean François Porchez founded Typofonderie in 1994 as one of the first digital type foundries in France. Typofonderie provides exceptionally high quality typefaces for adventurous digital typographers from a variety of type designers.

Typofonderie brings 10 fabulous font families into the Fontdeck library, including the classic superfamilies Le Monde, Ambroise and Parisine.

Allumi

Allumi: Technology in mind. 27 fonts, 2 widths.

Ambroise

Ambroise: An exquisite Didot font in 14 series & 3 widths.

Angie

Angie Sans: a sanserif with human touch in 6 fonts.

Anisette

Anisette: Art deco sans serif in 9 fonts full of features

Ardoise

Ardoise: a straightforward sanserif in 45 fonts, 4 widths

Le Monde

Le Monde: a superfamily of accompanying serifs and san serif.

Mislab

Mislab: a brighter slab n’ sans in 32 fonts, 3 widths

Parisine

Parisine: ultra legible forceful sanserif in 16 fonts

Give them a go

All 10 Typofonderie typefaces are available on Fontdeck for you to test-run now for free.

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Using the webfont loader to speed up perceived page loading

At Fontdeck we recommend you use the open source JavaScript webfont loader to load your fonts. Amongst other things, the webfont loader gives you some control over how webfonts load and render. At its simplest, you implement the webfont loader for your Fontdeck fonts by pasting this script block into the <head> of your page:

<script type="text/javascript"> WebFontConfig = { fontdeck: { id: '17222' } }; // change the project id accordingly (function() { var wf = document.createElement('script'); wf.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https' : 'http') + '://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js'; wf.type = 'text/javascript'; wf.async = 'true'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(wf, s); })(); </script>

The webfont loader asynchronously (without blocking other scripts or page rendering) loads a script from Fontdeck's servers which injects CSS @font-face rules into the web page. The webfont loader then adds classes to the HTML element which dynamically change depending on the loading status of the webfonts.

.wf-loading - This class is added when all fonts have been requested.

.wf-active - This class is added when the fonts have rendered (.wf-loading is removed).

.wf-inactive - This class is added if none of the fonts could be loaded (.wf-active is removed).

Internet connectivity varies, so it's always possible that a font will fail to load or load slowly. Because of this, the .wf-inactive class will be triggered after 3 seconds if the all fonts have failed to render. If at least one font successfully rendered, the .wf-active class will be triggered.

You can change the default timeout by using the timeout option on the WebFontConfig object:

WebFontConfig = { fontdeck: { id: '17222' }, timeout: 2000 // Set the timeout to two seconds };

Here's the gotcha when it comes to webfont rendering in modern browsers: when a browser detects that a piece of text should be rendered using a webfont, it hides that text until the font has loaded. If the fonts are taking a long time to load, it can be a long time until the reader gets some text to see. We can use the classes set by the webfont loader to alleviate this situation. To do this you'll need to add an extra set of rules to your site's stylesheet.

Write your rules as normal to use the webfonts. For example, this page uses the following:

h1 { font-family:"Ingeborg Heavy", "Hoefler Text", Georgia, serif; } body { font-family:"Akagi Medium", Calibri, "Segoe UI", sans-serif; } code { font-family:"Apercu Mono Regular", "Andale Mono", monospace; }

Then add the same set of rules, this time including the .wf-loading class and removing the webfont from the font-family. This will ensure text is rendered whilst the fonts are loading (albeit in the fallback font):

.wf-loading h1 { font-family:"Hoefler Text", Georgia, serif; } .wf-loading body { font-family:Calibri, "Segoe UI", sans-serif; } .wf-loading code { font-family:"Andale Mono", monospace; }

The upside of this technique is that users get text to read whilst the fonts are downloading. The downside is that while they are reading the text will change font and the page will reflow, potentially disrupting the reading experience (if the webfonts are a similar shape and size to the fallback fonts, the page reflow may barely be noticeable). If the user's device is fairly slow, the change in font may even be noticeable when fonts are drawn from the browser cache rather than being downloaded. A final tweak can be added to your code to help with this situation - we can hide all the text for, at most, just under a second to give the webfonts a chance to load from the cache (or down a fast pipe).

Add this line to the start of your webfont loader script:

var htmlEl = document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0]; htmlEl.className = ' hide-fonts'; setTimeout(function() { htmlEl.className = htmlEl.className.replace('hide-fonts', ''); }, 900)

Then add these rules to your stylesheet to hide the text for 900ms or until the fonts have loaded (whichever is the sooner):

.hide-fonts { opacity:0; } .hide-fonts.wf-active { opacity: 1; }

This example page uses these techniques, so you can view source to see how it all ties together.

The webfont loader also provides control down to individual fonts as well as JavaScript events, which you can learn more about on the Github page.

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Service update

Since around lunchtime of 12th March, service has been stable and generally good. That said there have still been reports of a few slow-downs in font delivery. When these occur they are lasting only a few seconds, however that is clearly not good enough.

We are told that, over the past few days, all the servers in the font delivery network are being updated one-by-one so as not to further interupt service. These upgrades, combined with a major upgrade to the load-balancing software, are continually improving the situation further, and by the end of today all slow-downs should be eliminated completely.

A more detailed explanation of what happened, what's been done, and what will happen in the future, will follow when we are fully furnished with the information from our software and CDN partners.

We will also be posting some details of how to stop web fonts, and other such assets, from delaying pages rendering. Meanwhile, these techniques (perceived performance, font events, asynchronous CSS) from Filament group are a good place to start.

Thank you once again for your patience, and please accept our apologies for any disruption caused.

[rich-fontdeck]

Yesterday and today’s font delivery slowdown

Yesterday morning some of our European servers went down due to a runaway rsync process. This was corrected and service restored by our technology and CDN partners, OmniTI.

However it transpired that the monitoring system was still incorrectly listing some of the servers as down, causing a lot of additional traffic to shift to a small number of servers resulting in another slow-down. This was identified and fixed at 16:28 GMT yesterday and since then traffic is being balanced correctly again across all of our network.

OmniTI are investigating how the server problem arose in the first place and what mitigation can be put in place to mitigate and avoid any such issues in the future.

Update - 12 March 11:40 GMT

The problem seems to have arisen again this morning in an intermittent manner. We are trying as hard as we can to get information out of the technology partners who are actually responsible for the servers. At this point in time they've not yet been able to give us an ETA for a stable solution.

Update - 12 March, 13:45 GMT

At the moment, everything should be running correctly, although we're still working with OmniTI to gain confidence in the system stability.

Update - 12 March, 19:15 GMT

Since our previous update, customers shouldn't be noticing any disruptions to the service. An automatic watch is being kept on any further CPU symptoms, with an automated process in place, set to a conservative threshold, to deal with any symptoms which may arise. Meanwhile OmniTI are still investigating the root cause of the problems.

Thank you for your patience and please accept our apologies for any inconvenience slow font delivery may have caused.

[rich-fontdeck]

Working round the soft hyphen bug in Webkit

Recently a Fontdeck customer asked for help regarding a problem he was having with a soft hyphen. Our chief web typography evangelist, Richard Rutter, investigated further and uncovered a peculiar bug in Mac-based Webkit browsers, including Safari and Chrome. Fortunately Richard also found a workaround.

Soft hyphens enable you to manually insert hyphenation points in words. Thus a soft hyphen is a hyphen which is only displayed when a word is split across two lines. Put another way, the character says ‘hyphenate here if you need to’.

Richard has gone into lots of detail about the bug on his blog, but in summary under some circumstances, when using webfonts (any webfonts, not just Fontdeck) Mac Webkit browsers will display a missing glyph￰ symbol where the soft hyphen is placed, for example:

To fix this, include Arial somewhere appropriate in your font stack, eg.font-family: "Apercu Light", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif.

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The Heartbleed vulnerability & Your Fontdeck account

On April 7th 2014, a new security vulnerability was announced in OpenSSL, a cryptography library used to secure most of the traffic on the internet. This vulnerability is commonly known as "Heartbleed", and this xkcd comic also explains the core idea very well and extremely concisely. Fontdeck's account management system uses OpenSSL to maintain the privacy of data sent between your computer and our servers. All our servers were updated quickly (last week) after the vulnerability’s announcement and we are currently replacing all SSL certificates. We have no reason to believe that any data was actually compromised. However we recommend that you change your Fontdeck password. To change your password, log in and go to your Account details page. The Heartbleed vulnerability was a near-unprecedented security event and was not unique to Fontdeck. We recommend you check whether other sites and services you use were vulnerable, and consider resetting your password on all of them.

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Introducing Alverata, a new typeface by Gerard Unger

Alverata is a brand new super-family from TypeTogether, designed by the legendary dutch type designer, Gerard Unger.

Alverata sample

In essence Alverata is a contemporary typeface with roots in early Europe. Standing out against the current trend of humanist sans-serifs, Alverata is a glyphic sans-serif face inspired by the shapes of romanesque capitals in inscriptions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, without being a close imitation of them.

Alverata performs beautifully on screen, delivering excellent legibility. Its letters are open and friendly in small sizes and lively and attractive in large sizes. They are robust, and show refinement in their detail.

Alverata Regular at various sizes on Mac OS X

Alverata Regular at various sizes on Windows 7

Alverata Italic on Mac OS X

Alverata Italic on Windows 7

Alverata is an extensive type family, with six weights, real italics, and versions for both formal and informal settings. Alverata consists of three different fonts: Alverata, Alverata Informal and Alverata Irregular, that vary in form and width, but maintain the same spirit.

Alverata Informal

Alverata Irregular

Try for free

Fontdeck provides full versions of Alverata which include an array of OpenType features, Cyrillic and Greek characters, alongside leaner Latin-only subsets. As with all fonts on Fontdeck, you can try Alverata for free, for as long as you need.

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In the Showcase: DuBois et fils, Etch and Glassworks Studio

Here's another collection of beautiful sites from the Fontdeck showcase.

DuBois et fils are the oldest watch makers in Switzerland. Bourgeois is for a seriously modern, technical touch for all headings.

Etch describe themselves as makers of fine data products. They combine old-school craftsmanship with state-of-the-art techniques, and use the increasingly popular Aperçu to exemplify that perfectly.

Glassworks Studios are an online shopping destination based out of a converted glass factory in Shoreditch, London. Their site uses balances the spiky, high impact Acier BAT Text with the subtle understated Oslo.

Do you have a site using Fontdeck that you would like us to showcase? Get in touch in the comments or on twitter and tell us about it!

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G-Type joins Fontdeck!

We’re delighted to announce that the G-Type foundry has partnered with Fontdeck.

Nick Cooke founded G-Type in 1999, initially specialising in logo design and custom fonts for clients including Tesco and the Mail On Sunday. G-Type now offers a great diversity of styles and aesthetics, and brings 17 fabulous font families into the library, including the best selling Chevin and Houschka super families.

Chevin

Chevin Standard.

Chevin is a rounded, modern, economic sans-serif, available in 6 weights in both its Standard and Pro versions. Highly recognisable in the UK due to the Royal Mail's adoption of it as a corporate font since 2007, Chevin's aim of legibility paired with its condensed style makes it ideal for body text but also smooth and impactful when applied at signage and display sizes.

Chevin Pro.

The Pro version boasts both Greek and Cyrillic layouts with several sets of numerals and small caps, as well as other OpenType features.

Chevin Eco.

Chevin Eco works well as a display font, providing a bit of Las Vagas and nightlife to headlines in both its Bold and ExtraBold weights.

Houschka

Houschka.

Houschka is an elegant, tasteful and friendly sans-serif with geometric leanings. It provides an approachable business aesthetic in its standard form and a friendlier, softer look in its rounded companion.

Houschka Rounded.

Houschka Rounded is an excellent alternative to the frequently used VAG Rounded, keeping the qualities of standard Houschka but with softer curves and terminals giving it an overall 'cuter' appearance.

Houschka Alternates.

Both versions of Houschka are available with Alternate variants, providing identical impacts but with straight A and W characters, for a more conventional look.

Organon

Organon Sans and Serif.

Organon provides a complimentary pairing of sans and serif that work beautifully in unison. In tandem they make an elegant combination as they share similar cap and x-heights, stem widths and ascender/descender values, allowing them to work interchangeably.

Organon OpenType features.

The OpenType features available within Organon allow for alternate A, G and Y characters as well as many other typographic options to create a professional, consistent, stylish aesthetic.

Give them a go

Chevin, Houschka, Organon and all 17 G-type typefaces are available on Fontdeck for you to test-run now for free.

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Ampersand New York Video Preview

We're very pleased to once again be sponsoring the Ampersand web typography conference. For the first time ever, Ampersand will be held in New York. Mark your calendars for 2 November 2013, and read on for details of a massive discount for Fontdeck customers.

Ampersand will be the usual fantastic one-day, single-track event put together explicitly for knowledgable web designers and type enthusiasts. You'll be able to immerse yourself in the nitty gritty details of all aspects of web typography, presented by world experts in typeface design, layout, typesetting, and front-end development.

Here's just a few of the faces who will be talking at Ampersand New York this year:

Jonathan Hoefler will be 'Putting the Fonts into Webfonts'

Mark Boulton will be discussing 'Typography in Responsive Design'

Luc(as) de Groot will be uncovering 'Readability Per Square Centimeter'

Jenn Lukas will be riffing 'On Icon Fonts & Working with Designers'

You can find more details of the full schedule of speakers and get updates from @ampersandconf, including an announcement of our final, very special keynote speaker.

Check out some previous speakers

To give a you a flavour of the Ampersand experience, the conference organisers Clearleft have just published some videos from this year's conference in Brighton. We've compiled them together here:

Get $100 Off!

As promised above, Fontdeck customers can get a whopping $100 discount off the standard price for Ampersand. Just use the promo code "FONTDECK" and you'll be sorted.

Hope to see you in November!

[rich-fontdeck]

Big improvements to service in Europe

We've been working very hard recently to improve font delivery across Europe, including bringing up a new dedicated infrastructure in Amsterdam. We've changed datacenters and locations for service in Central and Eastern Europe. I'm very pleased to say this will radically improve both performance and stability for Fontdeck font delivery not just in Europe, but globally. Thanks to Theo, Clinton, Jon and the team for all their hard work and long weekends over the past weeks.

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Virtual Seminar on Typography in Responsive Web Design

Next week, on Thursday, 18 April 2013, Fontdeck’s Richard Rutter will be presenting a 90 minute virtual seminar on Typography in Responsive Design. Registration is only $129 and you’ll be able to attend from the comfort of your own desk, sofa, or wherever suits you.

You’ll learn to:

Use typography as a basis for responsive design

Set type for readability across multiple devices

Choose and combine web fonts

Improve web font performance

Use advanced CSS 3 features

Richard will describe how to make web typography work across any number of different devices, and how it can and should be the basis of any responsive web design.

He’ll tell you why good typography matters (you may be surprised) and how to perfect the typography in your own designs using OpenType and cutting-edge CSS features you can safely use right now.

Richard will take you through the how and why of choosing web fonts and pairing typefaces, and he’ll describe a range of options for optimizing the display of web fonts across different devices.

Whether you’re a front-end developer, graphic designer, or UX specialist, you’ll love to hear Richard translate cutting-edge research and tools into practical techniques you can start using today.

Throughout the seminar, you’ll be building up a fully-loaded example web page you can take away to learn from and experiment with afterwards.

To book your place, and for full details, go to the UIE seminar page.

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In the Showcase: The Shard, Vans & Keane

Here's another collection of stunning sites from the Fontdeck showcase.

The recently opened Shard is the tallest building in Europe. FS Albert Web is used for all headings, complimenting the overall modern look and feel of the website.

Vans is a U.S based manufacturer of extreme sport shoes. A heavy Nimbus Sans is used alongside the classic Franklin Gothic, a successful pairing that reflects their diverse target group.

Keane are an English alternative rock band from East Sussex. Their site uses the geometric Futura for all headers.

Do you have a site using Fontdeck that you would like us to showcase? Get in touch in the comments or on twitter and tell us about it!

[rich-fontdeck]

Focus on the Northern Block

In the middle of a freezing Yorkshire winter in 2006, Jonathan Hill founded The Northern Block digital type foundry. The goal was - and has been ever since - to design & develop new and original typefaces, with a high technical value that work in the commercial market place.

Jonathan and The Northern Block’s reputation has grown ever since, along with his catalogue of distinctive and high usable typefaces. At the time of writing, there are 47 Northern Block font families available through Fontdeck - a phenomenal number for a foundry only 6 years old.

Neogram

Chief among Jonathan's prolific output includes the hugely popular NeoGram superfamily with its 27 styles plus real italics and 3 different widths. Influenced by the Haas type foundry (of Helvetica fame), Neogram is deliberately neutral sans-serif with a slightly softened clarity of form.

Neogram in use by Ellis David

Brokman

Brokman was designed to be both new and relevant to today’s graphic and web designers. The process of designing Brokman was contemporary too, and entirely novel. Jonathan engaged fellow typographic professionals on forums such as Typophile to essentially provide a collective design brief and subsequent feedback on the designs.

The result is a geometric sans-serif in no fewer than 10 weights which maintains a smooth line consistency throughout the family. An applied optical balance between horizontal and vertical strokes keeps the geometric shapes feeling more natural.

Borda and Planer

Borda and Planer are particular favourites among Fontdeck users. Borda is a carefully drawn geometric typeface. Exacting angles are combined with smooth corner details to form a clean, legible font with a modern appearance. The compact nature of the letterforms allows for great use of space across text layouts.

Planer, on the other hand, is a modern rounded typeface combining humanist elements with a strong geometric grid. The result is a font that can produce striking visuals at large scale and clean line legibility at text size.

Tadao

At first glance, Tadao would seem to be essentially a display and headline face, although further inspection reveals it to work just as well in body copy. This is down to the precise, rounded forms and a clean and linear appearance. The compact nature of Tadao allows for great economy of space across layouts.

Tadao in use by Rik van der Velden

Regan & Regan Slab

Regan, seemingly named after John Thaw’s character in the Sweeney, is a finely crafted yet uncomplicated sans serif. Soft curves are mixed with minimal angles to create a readable font ideally suited for online use. The 10 weights with italics provide plenty of flexibility for display work and headlines, as well as running text.

The simple curves and sharp angles of Regan Slab match perfectly with Regan, and the two can be interchanged at will.

We're really looking forward to seeing more Northern Block fonts arrive at Fontdeck - knowing Jonathan, we won't have to wait long!

[rich-fontdeck]

Fontdeck Cookies and EU Law

In line with recent changes in European legislation (Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, Directive 2009/136, laws in EU countries now require website operators to ask for a website user’s permission when placing certain kinds of cookie on their devices for the first time.

When you use Fontdeck webfonts on your website, cookies are set by f.fontdeck.com. We believe these cookies fall into the category of fonts which do not need explicit permission, although if you have Terms of Use for your website, you may wish to mention that Fontdeck sets cookies. This explanation of what Fontdeck webfont cookies do may help:

Fontdeck sets a single session cookie for each font requested. Each cookie contains (nothing but) a random string used solely as part of our caching and font security measures. The cookies are removed as soon the browser is closed (or the session otherwise ends). They contain no personal information and are not used for gathering analytics or tracking at a personal or aggregate level. Their sole purpose is to check whether we should serve the webfont from cache or not.

Further information and clarification on the EU directive, and the subsequent UK law can be gained from the ICC UK Cookie Guide. Importantly this guide has the blessing of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data privacy regulator responsible for policing the EU legislation.

In the ICC UK guide, cookies are divided into four purposes:

1. Strictly Necessary

Generally these cookies will be essential first-party session cookies. They include (but are not limited to) remembering previous actions (e.g. entered text), shopping basket functionality, and maintaining tokens for secure areas. These cookies will not be used to gather information that could be used for marketing, or to remember customer preferences or user identification outside a single session. Cookies in this category do not need consent.

2. Performance

These cookies can be first or third party, session or persistent cookies. Their usage should be limited to performance and website improvement, including website analytics, ad response rates, affiliate tracking and A/B testing. Consent for cookies in this category could be obtained in the terms and conditions of the site.

3. Functionality

These cookies can be first party, third party, session or persistent cookies. These cookies will typically be the result of a user action, such as setting layout or font size preferences, remembering a choice or fulfilling a request by the user such as submitting a comment. Consent for cookies in this category could be obtained in the terms and conditions of the site, or in an interface note adjacent to the functionality.

4. Targeting or Advertising

These cookies will usually be third-party cookies. Uses include cookies placed by advertising networks to collect browsing habits or cookies placed in conjunction with a service implemented by the website to increase functionality, such as commenting on a blog or adding a site to the user’s social network. Cookies in this category require users to be given a clear, informed choice.

We believe the cookies set by Fontdeck’s web fonts fall into the first, ‘Strictly Neccessary’ category as they are required for the fonts to be delivered, are session-based and contain no preference or user identification.

It should be said that the opinions given in this blog post refer to the UK’s interpretation of the EU directive and are not a statement of the law, and do not constitute legal advice.