Search

Art

Squarespace + TypeKit = Kick A** Website!

The following post is brought to you by Squarespace. Our partners are hand picked by the Design Milk team because they represent the best in design.

04.11.16 | By
Squarespace + TypeKit = Kick A** Website!

It would be hard to overstate my love of Squarespace so I was eager to write about the Adobe’s Typekit and Squarespace integration. I can sum up my love of Squarespace in one simple sentence: I’m lazy and I like nice things. After fumbling with my own WordPress site, I made the switch to Squarespace in 2014 and since then have created three other Squarespace sites. So, yes. I am a bit of a fan girl. But I was a little less sure of what the Typekit integration meant so after asking some questions about how to access Typekit, I realized that it was so well integrated that I had already been using it and didn’t even know it. Apparently, web genius, I am not.

And that’s the great thing about both Squarespace and Typekit. You don’t have to be a web designer or a coding genius to have a great site. Typekit is the font library that brings together thousands of fonts from different foundries in one easy to use interface. To get your creative font brain working, we asked some Squarespace gurus to share their favorite fonts. See their picks below:

Proxima-Nova

Proxima Nova is the font that I chose for my own website. I’m not alone in my Proxima Nova love. Last year designer Tri Branch Vo wrote an article for Medium, titled “Why Proxima Nova is Everywhere.” According to Font Reach, Proxima Nova is used by 35 million websites making it the 25th most popular font. Designed by Mark Simonson in 1981, the font took off in 2002 when Rolling Stone used it in their rebranding. Sensing a changing landscape and a new appreciation for more geometric fonts, Simonson decided it was time for Proxima to really step into the spotlight. He resisted every character and created a new italic set. The font was rereleased as Proxima Nova in 2005. When Typekit acquired the font in 2009, and made it available on the web, its popularity soared.

And other Squarespace gurus seem to agree with my Proxima Nova love. Jared Gibbons, founder of Pocketknife said, “We strive to create clean and minimal Squarespace websites, and the Proxima Nova font helps us to do just that. The geometric look and feel, coupled with its various styles and weights makes Proxima Nova a great font for the style of website we love to create.” They even used it to create their own website!

Poxima-Nova-sketch

Mark Simonson’s first initiation of Proxima Nova, then called Zanzibar c.1981, the full history of the font is here.

futura-spec-sheet

Futura spec sheet via Typekit blog

Influenced by the geometric emphasis of the Bauhaus, Paul Renner wanted to design a font that was timeless and rooted in form and function. The result was Futura. He certainly got the timelessness part right. The font has been popular since its 1930 conception. Justin Page Wood of JPW Design Studio is big fan of Futura. Justin says even though it was designed in the 1930s, “it is just as beautiful and relevant today as it was then.” Ryan Kodzik of Blue Like Neon agrees, “Futura is a classic. I never get sick of it.” (This is also the font that Jaime uses for her Squarespace website.)

leitura news

A site designed by The Beauty Shop for up a Squarespace site for C2 films in Australia that uses Leitura for all the headlines and quotes.

Jen Thomas of The Beauty Shop in Portland, OR said that her team current favorite was Leitura News. It was designed by Portuguese type designer Dino dos Santos, whose original intent was to create fonts that were virtually invisible to the reader, with the focus on the content, not the type: “We’ve been really into chunky new-era serifs like Leitura lately for headlines and large, blocky quotes.”

Yeshen

FF Netto Web on the Yeshen website

Yeshen Venema votes with his feet for FF Netto Web. It’s the body font he use for the website of his eponymous U.K. design shop. Designed to be a no-frills typeface, Yeshen explains that it’s a favorite go-to font because it “it reads very well on screens and has a quiet authority.”

lexia2

Stacey Edelstein of Raygun said, “Typefaces by the London foundry Dalton Maag are some of our favorites to work with.” She particularly loves Lexia. “[It’s] full of personality, with a wide range of weights that gives us a lot of flexibility when designing across multiple screen sizes.”

penna-connected-website

Penn Connected on the Manifredi Jewels website

Michael DeMartin of Design Site has been using Squarespace since the beginning and loves the platform. He just completed an e-commerce website for Manfredi Jewels, of Greenwich CT. The website required a lot of customization, and they wanted to use an elegant script font. They chose Penna Connected, designed in 1994 by Portuguese designer Dino dos Santos.

What’s your favorite Typekit font? Tell us down in the comments section.

Try out Typekit with Squarespace with a free trial and get 10% off your first purchase using offer code DESIGNMILK.

Amy Azzarito is the author of "Nest: The Secret History of Things that Make a House a Home" forthcoming in 2020.