Yesterday Google announced it's new Font API and it is completely amazing. They set up a web font directory where they have open sourced a bunch of fonts. To use one of them, say Tangerine, in your web page you just include the following in the document head:<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine">
and then reference 'tangerine' in your CSS just like it was an installed font.
Google also teamed up with TypeKit who open sourced their WebFont Loader which is a nice way to deal with some possible loading issue differences across browsers.
Raph Levien, creator of the great Inconsolata font, works on the project for Google. There is an interview with him about it here.
This is really exciting news for web designers. Typography has been something of a sore spot up until now. Like a lot of helpful improvements to the web, this doesn't break an amazing amount of new ground. You could already do this all yourself with @font-face. But what Google has done is to make it extremely easy to implement, while helping everyone out with the added bandwidth requirements of having to download the fonts to the users computer. Hotlinking the fonts from the same Google URI means that designers can feel very confident of the fonts already being in the users browser cache. Simple and extremely helpful. Thanks again Google. And get ready for much more interesting typography on the web.
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Google also teamed up with TypeKit who open sourced their WebFont Loader which is a nice way to deal with some possible loading issue differences across browsers.
Raph Levien, creator of the great Inconsolata font, works on the project for Google. There is an interview with him about it here.
This is really exciting news for web designers. Typography has been something of a sore spot up until now. Like a lot of helpful improvements to the web, this doesn't break an amazing amount of new ground. You could already do this all yourself with @font-face. But what Google has done is to make it extremely easy to implement, while helping everyone out with the added bandwidth requirements of having to download the fonts to the users computer. Hotlinking the fonts from the same Google URI means that designers can feel very confident of the fonts already being in the users browser cache. Simple and extremely helpful. Thanks again Google. And get ready for much more interesting typography on the web.
- jim 5-20-2010 2:20 pm