How Google Fonts is Changing the Web

It seems like only yesterday the web was filled with boring, standard fonts. To make sure your fonts showed up across the greatest number of users, designers were forced to limit their website’s font choices to those most commonly found on the computer.

With the creation of CSS3, most browsers started supporting a new font face tag, a way to deliver custom fonts to a web page. Unfortunately, font licensing can really be messy so embedding fonts into your web page isn’t always a good idea.

As a solution, a number of web font services stepped up. These services offered a beautiful solution: browse through their extensive library of fonts, then just copy and paste a simple line of code to implement them on your site.

The only problem with this was, many of these services changed a fee, and if you didn’t already have the font installed on your machine, you couldn’t put the font on a mock-up to share with the client.

Then Google decided to take a shot at web fonts, and created Google Fonts. Currently, they offer over 650 unique fonts to choose from. Here’s the best part: They’re all free!

With the creation of Google Fonts, your designer will be able to pick out the right combination of fonts to use on your website. Always remember, with custom fonts, less is more. While 650 different fonts is a lot to choose from, it’s best to limit your website to at most, two unique fonts.