Google Web Fonts - Goodbye Typekit and other paid font services

From early as 2001 I have tried to incorporate and embed stylish fonts using various tools in my and clients website but found it to be very inconsistent. Most of the tools were not cross browser compatible leaving me designing fancy font site with flash or plain simple graphics. This also pose other problems like size of the web page which became larger which posed other problems.

Then came Typekit with option to embed stylish fonts. Followed by Ascender. Over the period of time Typekit became the most popular webfont service provider. Large companies including Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Twitter, Harvard Business Review and many more became their client. Font plays a major role in branding and marketing. Besides that able to see sites in different stylish fonts makes them attractive as well. How long web visitor is going to be tied up with Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet and other similar traditional fonts. I have nothing against them but as a human we crave to see something different and creative. But due to price and packages offered by those existing companies made webfonts bit of a expensive game.

Good news is Google has entered the market and they have created webfont library to be used free of cost! Yes it's right - FREE. Google has listened to so many creative developers wishlist and have created the API's which can be easily embedded to any site. Have a look at this test page I have created. It displays three of my favourite fonts currently available in the library. I have used two methods of embedding the fonts. One is very very simple and the other one I would say simple.

Using CSS you can also add special effect like shadow to your font. Have a look at this page I have created which has one my favourite font Tangarine with shadow. That's only the beginning of what you can do with the Font API and CSS.

As Google said - The Google Font API helps you add web fonts to any web page. Benefits of the Google Font API include:

• A choice of high quality open source fonts.
• Works in most browsers.
• Extremely easy to use.