Google Fonts
Google takes web fonts to the next level. If you browse the internet you will notice to lack of creative use of typography. Unlike other media, such as print, web design typography is almost always very typical. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the designer, but instead the lack of support across the many different platforms used for rendering websites.
There are a few fonts that virtually all computers have installed on them. These have been coined as web-safe fonts – Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Verdana. When a website tells the browser to render font “Arial”, the browser fetches the font from the local computer and displays it properly. The problem with using custom font faces are that all computers viewing a website may not have the font. Therefore most website are built upon this very limited library of typography. Designers know they’re websites typography will appear correctly when using a web-safe font.
In the past, if a designer wanted to display more unique typography they would have to actually place an image.
The main problem with doing things this way is that search engines like Google cannot index or read image text. Another problem is that fonts can have adaptive sizes and are vector based. If you hold Ctrl and mouse wheel forward, you will zoom your browser in. Notice how the text stays crisp and the image based text gets blurry?
Enter web typography. Web typography is a new way of dishing up the font face. Using this method, when a website tells your browser to render “Arial”, it would provide a link to where Arial could be distributed to the browser. This provides the ability to display all sorts of new typography! The largest problem facing web typography is that open links to fonts allows that font to be downloaded locally. Type designers (or people that create font type faces) would have to give permission for this open source of distribution.
Google Font API in conjunction with the Google Font Directory is making web typography much easier to implement. Those familiar to CSS will find this extremely easy. Google offers a Font Previewer that makes it extremely easy to see what everything will look like. Then you just have to add the small line of code it provides and embed it into your CSS style sheet. The fonts are hosted on Google servers, and everything in the Google Font Directory are open source and free to use. This library will continue to grow as more developers add to it.
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