Why We Love: Google Web Fonts

If you’ve ever read our blog, newsletter, or even had a design conversation with someone at Alt Creative, you likely know how obsessed we are with fonts. Over the course of the past 5 or 6 years, we’ve been asked the question many times: Can we use another font for our website? Something other than Arial, Verdana, or Times New Roman? We LOVE fonts, but for main body text, we still always recommend going with the web safe fonts. However, thanks to some new technology in the world of web typography, designers and developers like us now have the option to insert some really great fonts into their web designs using embedded fonts for headers and image overlays. Our favorite solution is the Google Web Font Library.

Google has created a directory of open source web fonts and they provide an API service so that anyone can bring quality typography to their webpages.

Benefits of using the Google Webfonts API include:

• Embedded fonts are more SEO friendly.
• The fonts and API are lightweight and unobtrusive.
• There is a large variety of fonts to choose from.
• The API service runs on Google’s servers which are fast, reliable and tested.
• Google provides the service free of charge.
• It is possible to add Google Web Fonts to a website in seconds.