Designers, graphic artists and typesetters were forced to confront the bleak reality of an Arial-only world on Monday, after a key piece of typographical internet infrastructure went down.
Adobe Typekit is a web utility which allows designers to easily embed fonts within pages. While HTML generally requires users have a specific font installed on their machine for it to display properly online, Typekit ensures their machine can download it on-demand in order to see the page as intended.
WIRED.co.uk is among the millions of sites that use Typekit, allowing you, our readers, to see our work presented in a slightly more delightful manner.
However, early on Monday it was reported that Typekit was down -- and with it, much of the design verve of the internet.
WIRED's site was affected, with our usually spiffy headlines rendered painfully blocky in straightforward Arial font. Dozens of other sites were forced to rely on Arial or Georgia.
At first, Typekit said merely that its web font network was "down in some regions" and that it was working on a fix.
Adobe later confirmed that the problem was related to their "storage provider", who had suffered some sort of critical outage. The provider was said to be working on a fix, which by 12pm BST meant that service was largely restored for most users -- thus ending the most heart-pounding four hours in recent web design typographical history.
The design-focused edge of the web, however, is still struggling to recover: to anyone forced to read a WIRED story in a mixture of Arian, Georgia and Garamond, the nightmare of the great Fontpocalypse of 2015 will surely not be so easily forgotten.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
