Unfortunately their blog's "example" is just a static image (what are they thinking?). If you want to actually see samples of what the fonts look like go directly to the Font Directory: http://code.google.com/webfonts
Another very important advantage is that the browser can cache the stylesheet and the font, and can reuse them across multiple websites.
So if your website uses a font that is used by another website which the user has already visited, the browser doesn't need to download the font again. It doesn't even need to check the modification date on Googles server.
As many fonts add ~100 KB to the download size for a page, this really makes a difference.
I wish they'd serve everything from subdomains in google.com. I mean, seriously, why does Google keep registering new domains for projects (google<something>.com) when they could easily use <something>.google.com instead? What's wrong with fonts.google.com?
It says “The API will generate the necessary CSS specific to the user's browser so you can use the font on your page.” If you change your user-agent, you’ll see it change.
On my Windows 7 machine, they're really ugly (in IE, FF, Chrome and Safari). I double checked to make sure ClearType was enabled, and it is.
I don't think I'd use any of these in a project where I needed a polished look and feel.
I much prefer Smashing Magazine's non-Google font-ified header font.
Kudos to Google for taking on this project, though. As others have said, this could be a catalyst in getting the foundries to open up their fonts to the web.
Chrome, Firefox and Safari all render beautifully on my machine, with Safari experiencing some rendering errors; Firefox even does ligatures correctly, which is something I've had trouble with before with fontsquirrel and the like. Whereas on my Ubuntu box everything is sharp and jagged and ugly as sin, particularly in text sizes like 14 and 12 pt. I'm inclined to think that this may be a font rendering issue, like the known tendency for ClearType to cram everything to a pixel grid.
Wow this looks great. Just include the stylesheet and use the font in your CSS.
Seems like the big type foundries are going to regret dragging their feet on agreeing to a reasonable scheme for web fonts. I know that these are probably inferior in some ways to commercial fonts, but it will be a steep hill to climb to get people to pay for fonts if this project gains traction.
They don't have many fonts available yet, but if there is something I've learned about Google is that they always think big. Maybe in a couple of days they will announce the buy out of one of the foundries?
To be honest, how many fonts do you need? This is the web, and it is not 1998, when a lot of people would want to use as many fonts on their page as possible. Show some restraint.
More choice doesn't mean more typefaces on a single page.
Even if you use only 3 typefaces on a page, it doesn't mean you don't want access a library of a thousand fonts so you can use the perfect 3-5 typefaces.
More than that - most are too stylized to be used for body copy. You'd be amazed at how many times art directors or clients have forced me to use images for large chunks of copy.
For the most part I agree with you and feel that font-size, letter-spacing and line-height applied to standard fonts is enough for good typography.
Why are you implying that less fonts is a good thing? Just because someone might misuse fonts, that doesn't mean we should force everyone to use just what you think is okay. Magazines use all kinds of fonts and they typically look a hell of a lot better than most websites.
Google will tell you that they do things like this to make the web more usable, or on a larger scale, to make information more accessible. I think it’s mostly a sincere sentiment; what’s good for the web is good for google.
I was just redesigning one of my sites and was thinking seriously about using Typekit. This makes me rethink my strategy and will probably be a hard hit on Typekit.
Does Typekit have any advantages over Google? Google has better infrastructure, a simpler impelentation (no signup required), and a budget to license a wider variety of fonts.
This is a very exciting development that will offer great long-term benefits to the web. Relying on cross-platform fonts when building web pages was always challenging and limiting. I'm looking forward to this expansion of the font directory.
I also hope this improves the web browsing experience on Linux out of the box.
The descenders in the Droid sans headlines on Smashing are cropping for me in vista. The fonts are also aliased, but if I remember correctly, typekit also only produced aliased fonts in windows.
I am terrified that we're going to see a lot of people start using Droid Serif and Droid Sans. These are not hideous fonts, but I find them somewhat graceless and unappealing.
Yet another attempt by Google to control our words and by proxy, our minds. Once everyone depends on this font API to make their social mobisodes pretty, Google will do some clever pixel altering to insert favorable articles about itself into the New York Times. They'll change the Chinese government's website to say "we suck", and a virtual stop-hitting-yourself slapfight will spillover into real world bloodshed.
Nah, they just want to move people out of making graphics they can't crawl/translate/etc and instead encourage people to use a textual format that Google (and anyone else) can index.
