This idea that users need to see all text on your website in a particular font face (which is usually just a poorly packaged riff off of a famous font with minor changes that will largely go unnoticed by the unwashed masses) in order to market your product is absolute BS. Aside from a very few iconic font associations (e.g. IBM), there's no actual evidence that it actually works.
I fully support using a custom font for your visual assets - that's what SVG with text exported as curves/outlines was created for. But why should I use your horribly hinted, terribly rendered, absolutely illegible webfont (and have to download it to boot) just to read the copy on your website? Why should anyone?
Look at Apple. Despite what I'm sure their design team tells them, even they don't have an iconic font. They've bounced around between Helvetica, Myriad, Lucida, and a half-dozen other sans serif fonts that share certain design traits (which people do identify and associate in general), yet each time they introduce a new font they update their website to trigger your browser to download the webfont to render the page. It's a pointless exercise in the name of job security.
Companies have had websites going back 30 years. Web fonts have existed for a long time. This trend of each company having to pay tens of thousands to commission an unrecognizable, undistinguishable typeface that all text on their website must appear in is a brand new phenomenon, and there's zero proof it does anything besides (poorly) accomplish what someone thought was a good idea.
I fully support using a custom font for your visual assets - that's what SVG with text exported as curves/outlines was created for. But why should I use your horribly hinted, terribly rendered, absolutely illegible webfont (and have to download it to boot) just to read the copy on your website? Why should anyone?
Look at Apple. Despite what I'm sure their design team tells them, even they don't have an iconic font. They've bounced around between Helvetica, Myriad, Lucida, and a half-dozen other sans serif fonts that share certain design traits (which people do identify and associate in general), yet each time they introduce a new font they update their website to trigger your browser to download the webfont to render the page. It's a pointless exercise in the name of job security.
Companies have had websites going back 30 years. Web fonts have existed for a long time. This trend of each company having to pay tens of thousands to commission an unrecognizable, undistinguishable typeface that all text on their website must appear in is a brand new phenomenon, and there's zero proof it does anything besides (poorly) accomplish what someone thought was a good idea.