“Making the web beautiful”
Only a few years ago, the internet was a much duller place to be. Don’t get me wrong, the technology and information at our fingertips was amazing – but the design limitations made it it more of an eyesore than an eyeful. One of the many limitations was that there was only a small handful of fonts that could actually be used online. With a growing need for companies to have an online presence, the challenge of creating unique looking websites with the ‘same old’ set of font styles became harder and harder.
So, back in 2010 Google launched ‘Google Fonts’ – a directory of fonts, as well as a service to make it possible to actually use these fonts online. The ability to use more fonts revolutionised the look and feel of the internet, giving websites the sort of typographic style and elegance, previously only ever achieved in print. These days, Google Fonts has over 800 font families to choose from and is a must have tool for most designers searching for ‘that font’ to set their design apart from the rest.
old-google-fonts-website The old Google Fonts websiteWhat’s new?Fonts.google.com (the new home of google fonts) will reform the way we search for and choose web fonts – it’s elegant, playful and very easy to use and we are very excited! Gone are the days where choosing the perfect font is almost guesswork, where the search results display dozens of fonts in the same sentence, a sentence as likely to be used in real life as Comic Sans on a designer’s computer!
The phrase, which contains every letter of the alphabet (Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack) has now been replaced by a different set of sentences, but this can easily be changed to suit. The user can change the default sentence to anything they like – such as paragraph text, numerals or their own custom content – and these changes can even be applied across all the search results to give a concise and clear overview. Google’s consideration for the small things doesn’t stop there, with a built in ability to change the background colour of the page, the user really can ‘try before they buy*’ (*or download for free, if you will!).
The user can choose to scroll through the full directory of fonts until something strikes their fancy, or they can search and filter their results depending on the required style. Whether you are looking for a specific font, an idea, or are just browsing, you will find the whole process effortless. Fonts can be added to the downloads list and downloaded at any point, but if more information is required each font family has a comprehensive detail page. This page gives information about the font designer, the font itself as well as in depth analytics of fonts the usage and popularity. The UI has made a huge difference!
There is quite a buzz in the office about this, so it got us chatting about which fonts are getting us excited:
google fonts-anya google fonts-ben google fonts-lisa google fonts-scott
