We recently partnered up with Monotype, the leading global type foundry and technology provider, and equipped AdCreator 4 users with a wide selection of Monotype’s stunning Web fonts supported across all platforms and devices.
This is an article from a series of our product updates, co-written by Martijn Dijkhuizen, Software Developer and Matija Zupan, Video and Content Producer at Celtra.
We recently partnered up with Monotype, the leading global type foundry and technology provider, enabling us to equip AdCreator 4 with a broad selection of Monotype’s Web fonts used widely in branding and advertising. The integration of more than a hundred Web font typefaces from 16 popular font families, including Helvetica®, Univers®, ITC Avant Garde Gothic®, Trade Gothic® IT, and Avenir Next®, will not only help our clients maintain a unified brand experience through typefaces of their choice, but also make ads lighter and faster to load.
Web fonts are a critical element to responsive design and dynamic, cross-screen advertising. They allow brands and advertisers to easily produce consistent and crisp text rendering across an ever-expanding range of screens and devices. They also enable brand and advertisers to present dynamic ad content in style – without sacrificing any aspect of brand consistency. Unlike system fonts, whose availability differs from platform to platform and from device to device, Web fonts are accessible from anywhere, and thus offer full cross-platform support.
The large collection of fonts in AdCreator 4 and the few clicks needed to select a font or add a font decoration, minimize the need to include images containing stylized copy, which in turn cuts down both the production time, and the size/load time, of an ad.
The availability of the long-desired font families, with all the relevant valid typefaces, also signifies an end to artificially generated bold and italic typefaces. In order to integrate all typeface styles, such as light, demi and condensed, we had to develop an agnostic font picker that works across all the relevant components – Button, Countdown, Dropdown, Input, Stopwatch, Nearby, Facebook Share, Twitter Share, WhatsApp.
In addition, all text options had to be unified along with their functionality, and as a result, most of the above-mentioned components had to be rewritten. Of course, this didn’t come entirely without complications. An interesting issue that we stumbled upon, was the inability of Internet Explorer to load a font in cases where the CSS property “font-family” character length – including quotes, preceding comma, and trailing semicolon – was longer than 31 characters. When the “font-family” exceeded the character length limit, we transformed it using an algorithm, to a shorter fixed-length value, that represents the original “font-family” value.
All in all, the development process of integrating Monotype Web fonts support did not only enhance the cross-screen, responsive and dynamic functionalities of our prior AdCreator 4 releases, but also helped us further raise our standards of providing clients with immense branding possibilities.