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May 19 2010 by tobs

Google webfonts

I’ve been very excited about webfonts for a while. I genuinely think they will change design on the web quite considerably. So when I started to work for Google in January I pretty soon joined the team working on webfonts with my 20% time.

And today I’m really, really happy to see the Google Font API and Google Font Directory being launched during Google IO. The API let’s you embed free open source fonts directly from the Google servers by adding one line of code to the html header of your page.

You can find all the fonts that you can use in the font directory . We hope that this will improve the the state of typography on the web by giving developers and designers a set of free quality fonts. There’s even a javascript library that was developed together with typekit.

I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on a great project like this with an absolutely awesome team. And we’ll continue to work on improving the font directory even further for you.

http://code.google.com/webfonts/

screenshot of the googlw font directory

  1. 3057 MR
    21.05.2010

    Really looking forward to use it in my new project. But I have a question tough: Should I use the font API or the js library? And what do you know about webfonts.fonts.com? Its free and has a very large font collection.

    Thanks again!

  2. 3058 tobs
    21.05.2010

    Great to hear! To load the fonts into your page you can use either. If you don’t want to be dependant on javascript then it’s better to get the fonts through the regular api.

    webfonts.fonts.com is a great resource but while a test account is free (I think) to use all their fonts you have to pay a subscription fee.

    hope that helps,
    tobs

  3. 3063 Matthias Willerich
    22.05.2010

    Congratulations! I heard about it on Thursday, during a HTML5 workshop I organized at our company. I took it all in, all nice and sweet, and then your name was dropped, that of course made it super-exciting right away. I know this man!

  5. 3066 Noel Billig
    24.05.2010

    Hi Marc,

    I was super excited about this when it launched. Terrific work!

    I was wondering if you guys had plans to expand to include SVG versions of these fonts at some point. I’ve used FontSquirrel in the past to support webfonts and this feature allows the fonts to work on iPhones/iPod/iPads as well.

    Thanks,
    Noel

  6. 3067 tobs
    24.05.2010

    Hi Noel,

    glad you like the font directory.

    SVG support is definitely something to look into and we’re interested in supporting that too. We can’t make any promises at this point though..

    tobs

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