This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.

Over the last 15 years, web design and development has evolved tremendously. The introduction of CSS, advancements with HTML, the ever-increasing power of JavaScript, and technologies like Flash and Silverlight, have made the visual world of the 2010 web very different from the web from even five or six years ago. Except of course, for typography.

Typography is an important design element that can drastically alter the look and even the feel of content. However, because of technical (and licensing) restrictions, dynamic fonts used on the web have been limited to a small subset of styles. On the positive side, over the last twelve months the landscape for web typography has changed dramatically.

New technologies and services, including Google’s recently announced Google Font API, are making it possible for designers and developers to finally start experimenting with typography on the web.

Where We’ve Been

The history of typography and the web is long and often frustrating. Web-standards godfather Jeffrey Zeldmanwrote extensively about web fonts and standards last year and provides a good overview of the situation.There have been two main barriers keeping variable font choices from reaching the web:

1. Browser support. CSS3 re-introduced the @font-face selector — allowing designers to specifically embed certain fonts into their stylesheets — but browser compatibility with the format of those fonts varies. There are some formats that virtually every web browser except Internet Explorer supports. Conversely, the one format Internet Explorer supports isn’t supported by any other browser.
2. The font foundries. The people that create and license fonts, have been reticent to license fonts for use on the web. The big fear is that depending on how fonts are served, users can examine the source code and steal fonts for use offline.

Until last year, these two issues pretty much left designers and font enthusiasts in a bit of a quagmire. Fortunately, things have changed and are continuing to improve.

Where We’re Going

Last May, a service called TypeKit was announced as a way to help foundries become comfortable licensing fonts, while also offering web designers embeddable fonts for their designs in a way that could work across web browsers.

TypeKit opened to the public in November and has since partnered with a growing list of foundries to give Typekit users a wider array of options.

Other web type services exist, like Kernest, Typotheque and Fontdeck (Fontdeck is still in private beta).

Most of these services use JavaScript as a way to get around the fact that not all web browsers support CSS3’s @font-face selector and to also obfuscate the original font file.

Last week, Google announced its Font API and the Google Font Directory of open source fonts that are free for developers to use in their designs.

I spoke with Jeffrey Veen, founder and CEO of Typekit, via e-mail right after Google’s Font API announcement about what Google is doing, Typekit’s role in the process, and the future of type.

At first, I, like many, assumed that the Google Font API was a swipe directly at Typekit. This isn’t the case at all. In fact, Typekit and Google worked together to get Typekit Font Events into the open source projectWebFont Loader, giving designers complete control over how fonts are loaded.

Additionally, Google’s web fonts can be accessed from Typekit, meaning that switching between services is very easy.

This is what Veen had to say about working with Google:

“Working with Google was a great experience, and having them host the library is a great win for fonts on the web. Being able to use fonts on the web is incredibly exciting for designers and developers and has been a long time coming. But, like most new web technologies, the way browsers have implemented it is pretty inconsistent. The WebFont Loader library gives you a consistent want to handle what the browser does while the fonts are being loaded. If you think about how jQuery smoothed out browser inconsistency for JavaScript, that’s what the Web Font Loader does for @font-face.”

When I asked Veen to expand on the biggest hurdles in getting foundries to embrace web licensing, this is what he had to say:

“The type industry has been understandably cautious with putting their fonts on the web. A family of fonts can take years to develop, and having those files sitting on open web servers was a tough step for the foundries to accept. In addition, every foundry had its own set of terms and conditions for how licensed fonts could and couldn’t be used. So much of the innovation at Typekit has been to find a careful balance between the needs of foundries and the excitement of web designers. We did this by building a hosted service that adds some measure of protection to the fonts, and simplifying the licensing. Designers can now pay a yearly subscription and get access to literally thousands of fonts without having to worry about legalities.”

There Are Still Some Hurdles

While Typekit and other web font services are pushing the adoption of web fonts forward as well as getting more and more foundries (and designers and developers) comfortable with using and licensing fonts for the web, the proliferation of more web fonts does lead to some additional hurdles.Last November, Tim Brown and Jason Santa Maria both wrote fantastic articles for A List Apart about web typography.

Santa Maria discussed readability and correctly pairing fonts together. Brown talked about what the emerging web space means for how fonts are designed and the nuances of how different browsers render the same font.

These are important issues to take into consideration when you use fonts in your own designs. Just because you can use a script font to display your primary content doesn’t mean that you should. Save that for headings and accents, keep main content readable and clear.

The world of web typography is quickly evolving but this evolution means that web developers and end users now have more choices than ever before.