For the web designers in the crowd
Among the slew of major announcements Google is making this week (most of which I'm just linking in Twitter), here's one that is very simple, practical, and About Damned Time: Google has licensed a small pile of Web Fonts, and is hosting them free for anyone on the Web to use them.
Here's the Ars Technica article talking about the project; Google's Getting Started page, which describes how to use the fonts on your page (which turns out to be really easy); and the Font Directory itself. Personally, I'm especially enamored of the IM Fell font, which is just the sort of rough-typography font that I'm always fond of for SCA use -- readable, but with a sort of hand-printed feel.
Important caveat: I think this is all using the emerging standard for web fonts, which means that it requires a modern browser -- and I believe that specifically excludes all versions of IE to date. My impression is that this stuff will work in IE 9, but that's not going to be released for a while yet. So it's questionable whether you can use it for commercial stuff yet, but it sounds entirely plausible for personal pages...
Here's the Ars Technica article talking about the project; Google's Getting Started page, which describes how to use the fonts on your page (which turns out to be really easy); and the Font Directory itself. Personally, I'm especially enamored of the IM Fell font, which is just the sort of rough-typography font that I'm always fond of for SCA use -- readable, but with a sort of hand-printed feel.
Important caveat: I think this is all using the emerging standard for web fonts, which means that it requires a modern browser -- and I believe that specifically excludes all versions of IE to date. My impression is that this stuff will work in IE 9, but that's not going to be released for a while yet. So it's questionable whether you can use it for commercial stuff yet, but it sounds entirely plausible for personal pages...
