In general, Google, being a web-based company, stands to benefit from a faster and more attractive Internet. Google uses Google Fonts for its own platform, so it is in their interest to have visitors’ computers primed to use their products at lightning speed. Another is that, once a user downloads a web font once, they have it forever-so every site they visit with that font from then on will load at optimum speed. One of them is that they want to discourage web designers from using image files instead of font files, because images cannot be indexed by Google’s search algorithms. Mockup of a component of the new Google Fonts site, via Google So what’s in it for Google? Obviously they aren’t doing this just from the good of their hearts. Yes, free free: all of the typefaces listed in the Google Fonts directory are open source, meaning that you can not only use them for any web page, commercial or non-commercial, but, unlike with Typekit, you can also download them onto your computer and even tweak them yourself! Best of all, Google’s massive server power means that download speeds are lightning fast, ensuring that your web visitors have a good experience. Not to be outdone, the Internet giant decided to create a comparable service for free. The biggest of these services is Adobe Typekit.Įnter Google. Are Google Fonts really free? What’s the catch?įollowing the revolution, a couple of services popped up offering a good selection of web fonts for a monthly fee, which they shared with the professional font foundries who supplied the typefaces. Fonts that are made to interact with this software are called web fonts. A CSS program called arrives, making it viable for the first time for website visitors to download font-files on the spot without too terrible of a download time. If you come across something more unique, it’s probably an image file.įast forward to 2009. The web starts looking nicer, but you’re still mostly see the same typefaces over and over. In ’96, Microsoft decided to do the Internet a solid by distributing a selection of fonts for free, including Arial, Times New Roman and Verdana, in order to increase the stock of viable typefaces for web designers to use. If a visitor does not have the typeface you have used on your website, they have to download it on the spot, which in the days of dial up, is a no go. At this point, if you’re a web designer, the only typefaces you can reasonably select are the ones that you can be sure every personal computer owner already has installed on his or her machine. Rewind to the dawn of the modern Internet: 1996. First we need to breeze through some basic questions. Here we’re going to take a quick tour that will tell you what you need to know to use this service intelligently, whether you are a newcomer or a Google Fonts veteran. In June they released a brand new version of the website, and it is glorious. Mockup of a component of the new Google Fonts website, via Google As an increasingly design-oriented company, Google evidently saw that a major UI/UX redesign was in order. It got the job done, but it wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t especially easy to use. The original website was definitely what the startup world would call an MVP: minimal viable product. Over the next six years it grew considerably, becoming very popular with web designers-for the obvious reason of affordability. Google launched Google Fonts in 2010 to provide web fonts free of charge.
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