Websafe just got a lot more edgy

Jun

Photo by: John Manoogian III

For years, typography in web development was severely limited by preinstalled fonts on the major operating systems. Basically, web developers were limited to a handful of fonts to use in any website because you could never be assured that a visitor to your site would have any of the fonts you wanted to use. There had always been the ability to load fonts at the beginning of the page but licensing for fonts was never easy.

In steps Google. The great monolith seems to have solutions for problems even before we realize they are there. Google’s Webfonts hosts hundreds of fonts licensed for commercial use for free. And the selection is constantly expanding. When I first started using Google Webfonts about a year ago there were probably only 20 fonts. Now there are about 150.

You can freely use these font’s on web or print projects and you don’t even have to host them on your own server, Google even hosts them for you. Just load the font in the <HEAD> section of your HTML and then that font can be added to any style.