Google Fonts Expands Web Friendly Fonts for Online Text Enhancements

Netscape opened up the use of fonts on the Internet in 1995 with the new font tag.  For years after that there were only a small number of  ’web friendly fonts’ available for website designers and developers to use when integrating text throughout a website.  Search engines prefer text thus a better optimized website includes the appropriate use of text for heading, titles and content which is often not as visually appealing as an image could be.  Graphics designers have often made beautiful websites incorporating what appears to be text in an image because it provided unlimited font usage improving the visual appeal of a website but reducing the potential for higher rankings on search engines. 

Universal web friendly text fonts were limited to a small group including Arial/Helvetica, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana and Courier until recently.  This summer Google announced  a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API.  With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers. The excerpt below from the Google Code Blog outlines the basics:

The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

Getting started using the Google Font API is easy. Just add a couple lines of HTML to create text like the Tangerine Font below:

The Google Font API hides a lot of complexity behind the scenes. Google’s serving infrastructure takes care of converting the font into a format compatible with any modern browser (including Internet Explorer 6 and up), sends just the styles and weights you select, and the font files and CSS are tuned and optimized for web serving. For example, cache headers are set to maximize the likelihood that the fonts will be served from the browser’s cache with no need for a network roundtrip, even when the same font is linked from different websites.

These fonts also work well with CSS3 and HTML5 styling, including drop shadows, rotation, etc. In addition, selecting these fonts in your CSS works just the same as for locally installed fonts, facilitating clean separation of content and presentation.  Now text can be as pretty and visually appealing as image content online making the Internet better one website at a time.

Robert ‘Dot Com’ Jackson
InternetBuilderConsulting.com – Building BETTER websites and Online Marketing since 1995
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