Adobe nabs cloud-based Typekit font provider

Adobe Systems is expanding its creative services offerings with the acquisition of Typekit, a cloud-based, subscription library of hosted, high-quality fonts intended for designers and developers to use on their websites.

Financial terms of the deal have not been revealed yet, although the Typekit team is expected to stay together. Typekit will remain a standalone product, but it will also be integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which was also unveiled on Monday as a new initiative for developing desktop and mobile applications.

Lea Hickman, vice president of product management at Adobe, explained in statement:

Typography is a fundamental design element and something that designers want to be more creative with on websites -- especially as these websites now need to be viewed on mobile devices.

Working closely with type foundries, the Typekit team has delivered an outstanding service, empowering designers to present the power of the printed word in new ways -- online and on devices.

The loveliest continued as Typekit's co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Veen remarked on his company's blog that there is "no better place" for Typekit to go than Adobe:

But perhaps even more significantly, this represents a huge step forward in bringing fonts to the web.

Not very long ago, web fonts were a curious and controversial debate. When the four of us founded this company, nobody knew if it would even work.

Veen added that while "few sites used web fonts when we got started; today, new sites seldom launch without them."

Typekit serves up approximately three billion fonts per month on over one million different sites. The customer base is 250,000 strong and counting, which includes The New York Times, Zynga, Twitter and WordPress.com.

Typekit technology will also be used to provide new distribution mechanisms for its foundry partners, such as the growing collection of Adobe Web Fonts, which are selected from Adobe's library of classic typefaces and optimized for all current Web browsers.

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