Here’s an idea I had the other day. I am putting it out to the world because I’d love to see it realized. While I could do it myself, I already have enough on my plate - and knowing myself, I’ll never get around to it.
Update: Someone is watching - between me posting this and today (roughly 24 hours later) the domain name has been registered. Sleazy domain-shark register-bot or quick-fire entrepreneur? Your guess is as good as mine.
I was recently tasked with implementing a design using the Rockwell font. Rockwell is not a free font, and as far as I could tell, not licensed for embedding.
That left me with simply relying on users having the font installed, and only around 60% do. That meant I had to come up with some decent alternative fonts, preferably with a similar appearance and size.
What I would love for someone to build, is a site where I can look at the page for Rockwell and see a list of alternative fonts resembling it - preferably ordered by resemblance.
For extra credits a pre-made font-stack could be provided, ready for me to copy/paste into my CSS.
A powerful extra feature would be statistics of font usage, so I can see an estimate of how many people will see what font on my site.
Surely, building a library of all fonts, their alternatives and how much they look like each other is a huge task and I figure this could be crowd-sourced. Let the community suggest alternatives and vote on the already suggested alternatives. This definitely seems like something where a lot of people have ideas and knowledge they could share.
I tend to always fail at coming up with great ways to monetize services - outside of flat out having people pay to use them. I think a different model would be better for a site like this, as the usefulness of the service increase with the amount of users adding their knowledge.
Affiliate links to font sales is a fairly obvious choice. Ads is always an option, I guess, and the users of the site would be pretty well segmented.
Anyways, here’s hoping someone smarter than me can figure it out and make it work.
PS: For reference, here’s the font-stack I did end up using:
font-family: rockwell, 'rockwell std', Serifa, 'Serifa Std', Glypha, 'Glypha Std', Memphis, 'Memphis Std', 'Museo Slab', arial, sans-serif;Would Jason Santa Maria's Typedia be of any help? There are a list of similar fonts in the sidebar.
People looking to make money from this (good!) idea could take the referral links a little bit further. For each font in the fontstack that is embeddable, they could have referrals to a site that sells the licence for it.
"You can't have Rockwell, but you can have X, and you can make sure everyone sees the same thing."
Here is a good resource for some stacks:
http://www.awayback.com/revised-font-stack/
@bryan, I hadn't heard of Typedia before. That's definitely a step in the right direction, although for my specific situation it probably couldn't help all that much. That said it seems like Typedia is in a good position to build a project like this.
@montana, Thanks, that's a great (and pretty) article. There are a lot of individual collections of font stacks for various situations (http://unitinteractive.com/blog/2008/06/26/better-css-font-stacks/ is another one), but naturally they only cover a select few (the most common?) cases.
I like this idea - typedia is good, but does not go as far as suggesting good font stacks. Anyone implementing this would have to get around the issue of displaying the fonts though - typedia uses a kind of sIFR approach, whereas myfonts uses images - how they were generated I don't know.
It seems like Typedia relies on users uploading type samples. That would probably be the best way to go about this - shy of buying all fonts and generate images from them :)