11 May 2011 (updated 11 May 2011 at 18:03 UTC)
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Highlights from the webfonts session at Google I/O 2011
Just a few highlights from the Google webfonts
session at the Google IO 2011. Go ahead and watch the
whole video for the full context:
- "
we needed a better way to use and select fonts. So the
solution is webfonts.
"
- "
Google loves webfonts, webfonts not only make the web more
expressive, more semantic, more accessible, more
translatable, but they also make it more searchable. We
think webfonts is a win for everybody involved.
"
- "
Recently in the last two years, browsers started supporting
webfonts which means right now they are a great choice for
production applications in websites.
"
- "
there's licensing complexities involved, just because you
own a font and can use it on your local machine doesn't mean
you can use it on the web. And oftentimes, and probably more
often than not, the license to use the font as a webfont is
completely different.
"
- "
we're looking to make webfonts ubiquitous
"
- "
there's no licensing worries because all the fonts are open
source... you never have to think about how you're
constrained about using Google webfonts, we think this is
really important
"
- "
there is a really huge surge of demand from the Internet and
we're really excited about this
"
- "
1.29 million unique domains
"
- "
we started with 18 one year ago, we now have 175 font
families in the Google font directory, we're aiming for a
1000 within 12 months
"
- "
we worked with 45 designers from all over the world
"
- "
as we add more fonts to our library, we're also very
committed to keeping the open source license, we think this
is incredibly important
and the reason is that there's no telling what devices and
platform will be announced in the future and we don't want
you to have to worry about not being able to use these fonts
"
- "
They're your fonts as much as they are Google's and we'd
like you to know that and we'd like you to be creative with
your use...
"
- "
We can do that because they're open source, there is no
paygate that we need to put in place so we can go completely
foot to the floor to get these fonts as fast as possible,
that includes our cache strategy
"
- "
there's incredible increase in adoption, the more popular
the Google webfont service becomes the faster it's going to be
"
- "
with all the fonts we're adding every week now, that list is
growing fast
"
- "
it's very simple to bring Google webfonts directly inside
the CS suite via TypeDNA: I just right
click it and then click 'similar web fonts body'
which then takes me into Google and it makes suggestions of
similar Google webfonts
"
- "
you could actually go a long way by supporting one math
font, there is the STIX
font which is an open source font that a bunch of
organisations and publishers got together and designed
"
- "
Both of the primary licenses that we use, Apache
2 and the SIL Open
Font License, do allow for derivative works. You have to
do attribution and there's some rules about what, you know,
you name the fonts that you have to kind of respect the
wishes of the font designer around the names of those
derivative works, but you're free to mix them all together,
you know, add your own characters, basically do anything you
like
"
- "
we love the fact that there's many different options in the
space. We want to grow the pie, we want to make sure that the
folks who are just casual bloggers have sufficient
access to high quality fonts. We'll fill the market from
below, make a solid foundation
"
- "
Google webfonts do work in the Android browser.
"
- "
We have been slowly building out the range of international
character sets. A growing number of the fonts are also
supporting Cyrillic and Greek and a few other Latin Extended
ranges. We actually have a lot of Khmer fonts in the
directory. For the more complex scripts we're working with
the browser manufacturers, of course including Chrome, to
really make the support of these scripts bulletproof.
"
- "
It is definitely important for Google to make these fonts
worldwide, all languages.
"
