Adobe Typekit Web Fonts under EU/German Data Protection Law

THE QUICK ANSWER:

At the moment, Adobe Fonts’ general licence doesn’t allow you to choose specifically the geographic location of the servers that will be storing the fonts you need to run your clients’ websites. This is a problem for anyone in the European Union, and in several other countries.

Under the circumstances, the best recommendation is to choose typefaces with licences that allow you to store the font files on the same server that you use for the rest of the website. This is known as self-hosting, and you have two ways to do it:

• use open-source fonts;
• purchase a special self-hosting licence directly from the typefoundry.

THE MORE DETAILED ANSWER:

Although Adobe is headquartered in the United States, it is an international company. Adobe relies on its own servers – plus servers operated by third parties – which are located all around the world.

That means Adobe cannot guarantee that files you need to access from their servers will be located in a specific geographic location like the European Union. Since using Adobe Fonts – for both desktop and online use – relies on accessing font files from Adobe’s servers, the service is effectively out-of-bounds to all EU businesses and organizations who need to comply with General Data Protection Regulation laws.

This is not only an EU-specific problem. Any American company or individual who works with certain divisions of federal, state, and local governments have similar restrictions. The same applies to other nations and organizations who are required to maintain closed systems. This means that Adobe Fonts – as appealing as it may be – is simply not feasible for everyone.

As mentioned above, the best solution for your EU clients is to design and build their websites using self-hosted fonts. That means that the WOFF2 font files would need to be stored on the same server that stores the HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and other files required to make the website functional.

Services like Adobe Fonts and Monotype Fonts generally require that the font files are stored on their own servers. One reason: to count the number of times that people are visiting your website. Many website font licences are priced by the number of visitors; self-hosted fonts make it more challenging for the licensor to count precisely how many visitors you’ve had.

That means self-hosting website font licences for commercial fonts are considerably more expensive than standard website font licences. And you’ll have to purchase those self-hosting licences directly from the typefoundry.

If your client requires that a specific commercial typeface is used to maintain a consistent identity, then it’ll be your responsibility to explain to them what it’ll cost them.

If the choice of typeface isn’t critical, there are plenty of good-quality open-source typefaces available. Some of these typefaces are available on Adobe Fonts, but you’ll need to download the self-hosting webfont files elsewhere. Two excellent resources are:

Font Squirrel
https://www.fontsquirrel.com/

Google Fonts
https://fonts.google.com/

If you visit either of these sites, you’ll be able to download both desktop (OTF & TTF) and web (EOT, WOFF & WOFF2) versions of the fonts you need. In some cases, you’ll need to rebuild desktop font files into WOFF2 font files for your web server; Font Squirrel has a tool to do that:

Font Squirrel Webfont Generator
https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator

Please keep in mind that even open-source fonts have licences. Be sure that you read those licences carefully to verify that you have the legal right to self-host the fonts you need on your clients’ website servers.

An excellent example of an open-source typeface family is Juan Pablo del Peral’s Alegreya, available directly from his typefoundry Huerta Tipográfica:

Alegreya Serif
https://huertatipografica.com/en/fonts/alegreya-ht-pro

Alegreya Sans
https://huertatipografica.com/en/fonts/alegreya-sans-ht

These two typefaces are comprehensive: they support a wide range of languages that use the Latin alphabet, and have a diverse set of weights. Plus the typefaces are covered by the SIL Open Font Licence:

http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

You can download OpenType CFF (OTF), OpenType TT (TTF), and OpenType Web (EOT, WOFF & WOFF2) fonts directly from Huerta Tipográfica’s website. That’ll give you everything you need to design print work and build websites for your clients.

There are other excellent open-source typefaces available; it’s best to look around to find the ones you prefer.

I hope that answers your question. If not, please let me know.

Best regards
Andrew

–30–

Yeah, what Tarun Saini said.

The only thing you can do is license fonts from sites like MyFonts or directly from type foundries and host them yourself.

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I would like to inform you that Adobe Fonts does not provide font files to use locally. If you try to do that, then extracting the font files from their obscured location is a violation of our end user license agreement. 

Regards,

Tarun