Talking Typography with Jason Pamental
- 6. October 2022
Talking Typography with Jason Pamental
After college, Jason stayed involved in web design. He continued to enjoy typography in print, but, as Jason says, “that was it, there wasn’t really that much more that you could do.” Around fifteen years into his experience in web design, in 2009, Typekit (now part of Adobe), launched in beta, and a friend of his invited him to try it out. As Jason put it, “It just kind of reinvented web design”. Typekit is what got him thinking about typography on the web again, and he began using it in projects. From the beginning of the introduction of more types being used on the web came technical problems and frustrations with text either showing up without styles or sometimes not at all. Jason found himself trying to solve these problems so he could get back to designing and using typography. He was working in a new space with new problems and devoted a lot of time to talk about them and continued to learn more about typography on the web.
He soon signed on as the co-maintainer of the Typekit module for Drupal and worked on other open-source projects like Monotype for their new web font service. At this time, there was one main goal for those involved: overcome the difficulties and get more fonts on the web. This way, eventually, more people could design with more freedom. This is where Jason feels that the art and science of the web meet in order to create a better experience for everyone. Jason understands that typography is a niche, but it impacts readability, user experience, and branding. He respects the power of typography and explains that “type is how we hear what we read”.
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