Web design is hard. Years ago web designers had to make some tough choices when it came to typography on websites. You couldn’t just use any font you wanted for headlines or body text because unless the viewers of your site had the same fonts loaded on their machines they would get substitutes. And who knows what that would look like. So you chose from a short list of “web safe” fonts, standard fonts that everyone should have. If you insisted on controlling the fonts you could use graphics instead, but search engines can’t “read” images. Later, new ways of coding web pages (stylesheets) made it possible to use text for search engines and graphics for viewers, but it takes time to load images and fast loading pages are now an important SEO factor. More recently the use of Flash to replace text via some fancy coding solved most of those issues, and kept the text flexible. But now there’s something even better…
Google has created a Font Directory where anyone can access a growing list of fancy fonts. So a designer can code a website and specify any font in Google’s Font Directory and the viewer’s browser will go get that font to display it on the page. The only downside I see right now is that the number of fonts is rather limited, but it seems like a move in the right direction. According to Google “all fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.” Maybe they can change that policy or also add premium fonts eventually. Or maybe they are just doing this to make indexing the World’s information easier. Surely, no one cares more about “search engine optimization” (SEO) than the big G.
Anyone using the Font Directory yet?
