Idea: fontstack.com

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.

Use case

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.

Crowd-sourcing

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.

Monetization?

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;