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Google Fonts To The Rescue
Google Fonts To The Rescue
Jerry Gitchel
September 3, 2012
Web design is getting better and cheaper at the same time. No, really! Google Fonts is an important example of how moving web fonts from the desktop to the cloud improves the quality and control of your web design, while reducing the time, effort and cost. Read this article to learn how this simple switch reduced the cost of custom typography for this site by 90%.
A boutique website that displays plain typography just feels wrong, incomplete. When I created award winning artist Sandy Gingras' first website a decade ago, the flexibility of web fonts wasn't available. I had to cut apart Sandy's unique lettering into individual letters,  then combine them to build the custom look for how-to-live.com. Using images to represent text killed our SEO, not to mention the time and trouble to find the letter Q, Z and X in her work.Google Web Fonts Back then, fonts resided on individual computers. Designers could use any font that struck their fancy, and sites looked great while viewed on  a computer with the correct fonts installed. It was a different story when viewed on a different machine. An elegant script font often devolved into a plain vanilla Arial on a remote machine. Fast forward to my current project with how-to-live involving a migration to WordPress using Google Web Fonts. The simple idea of moving fonts from computers to the cloud opened up a bright new world of design opportunities. Now designers can use Google software to raise the quality of their typography to match the visual design of any site. For our current project we simply installed the WP Google Fonts plug and went shopping for a handwriting font. Then we found out it's completely FREE. We cut the cost of developing custom typography by 90%.

Using Google Fonts

For the WordPress platform simply search for and install the WP Google Fonts plugin. Once activated, you can choose up to 6 different fonts. Apply them to the heading and body style elements on your site and prepare to be dazzled by the magic. For other platforms head over to the New to Google Web Fonts? section and follow the 3 quick steps to bring web fonts to a website near you.

Insight

Google fonts was developed to solve a specific design challenge. The real payoff was the reduction in time, effort and the cost of creating custom typography. I'm often asked, "Do we have the technology to ...". My answer is always, "Yes, we have all the technology we need." There is constant innovation in the field of web design tools, platforms and strategies. The trend is cheaper, better, faster, and more. Business owners now have more control of the both process and the result. Don't accept, "It can't be done.", or "It's too expensive." as a response to your  design challenge. Search the web, push your web designer, or give me a call at 727-278-9382 when you hit the web design wall. Resources

Category : Making Your Technology Work