mindgarden

Since we released the Google font directory last wednesday the response has be nothing short of amazing. Twitter was going crazy and everyone from CNN to Mr. Zeldman himself have reported about it.

What’s especially great to see is that people are already using it on their websites and what’s more, creating plugins and howtos about it. These are just a few:

• CSS-Tricks features a nice interview with Raph Levien from the webfonts team

• Design Shack have a detailed tutorial on their site how to use the API

• Paul Irish has a more detailed look at the API and created an awesome Webfont Loader demo page

• My fellow Google webmaster Melissa Louie has a great page on her website demoing what you can do with webfonts and some CSS3

• There’s already a WordPress plugin

• ...and a Drupal Module as well!

• Also there’s a little github project that let’s you change the fonts on your page using some jQuery

And if you’re not a reading person and would rather sit back and watch a video about the font directory you can do that as well:

I’ve been very excited about webfonts for a while. I genuinely think they will change design on the web quite considerably. So when I started to work for Google in January I pretty soon joined the team working on webfonts with my 20% time.

And today I’m really, really happy to see the Google Font API and Google Font Directory being launched during Google IO. The API let’s you embed free open source fonts directly from the Google servers by adding one line of code to the html header of your page.

You can find all the fonts that you can use in the font directory . We hope that this will improve the the state of typography on the web by giving developers and designers a set of free quality fonts. There’s even a javascript library that was developed together with typekit.

I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on a great project like this with an absolutely awesome team. And we’ll continue to work on improving the font directory even further for you.

http://code.google.com/webfonts/

“Scribd:”http://www.scribd.com/ is a service for sharing and colaborating on documents online. And they have just switched the technology used for displaying documents online from Flash to open standards like html5 and webfonts.

On their website they’re explaining the reasons for switching with a presentation that’s worth mentioning. It sums up why open standards and the use of webfonts are important.

Read the presentation here: http://www.scribd.com/documents/30964170/Scribd-in-HTML5

I have been looking at some open source fonts for font embedding with @font-face lately. A good place to for good OFL licenced fonts is The League of Movable Type

To be able to test their excellent fonts and how they behave in different browsers I’ve built a little Specimen Browser using Tim Brown’s fantastic Web Font Specimen and some lines of JavaScript.

Just open up the Web Font Specimen Browser in the browser you want to test in and select a font from the drop-down. Without a selection it will default to Georgia and you can test all system fonts too by adding a ‘font’ parameter to the URL like http://marctobiaskunisch.com/WebFontSpecimenBrowser/?font=arial

This is work in progress and my plan is to add more fonts from other sources as well.

Here’s the link to the Web Font Specimen Browser again.

As you could tell by my last two postings and the friday link hysteria I read a lot of stuff in my feed reader. Some of it I share in google reader. Some of it I tweet about. Often I do both.

Enter Reader2Twitter which is a nice little app that lets you post your shared items from the feed reader to twitter using your reader ID und oAuth. There’s also an option to only post items on twitter that have notes to them in reader. This is what I’m using so I still have control over what gets tweeted and what not. You can even set a pattern for your tweets. (Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean this will triple the number of tweets I’m posting. It just makes things easier for me when I actually do want to tweet and share the same thing).

So if you want you can follow me on twitter