Free At Last :Typography Web Pages

When I went to one of the most anticipated sites, font-face.com, which soon promised (for a price) to finally free designers to use actual fonts that could be viewed on their webpage, I was greeted with this epitaph:

Our Google Announcement

Google have recently announced that they are also entering the web-font market – with the same free, hosted model as ours.

Although we have put 100′s of hours into the design, development and readying of 150+ fonts (x4 formats = 600!), with only weeks before font-face.com was ready to go live, we have decided to bow out now. A bitter blow to the team.

Our decision has not been easy. Although we feel we would offer a better service, we would after all be competing with Google. A massive might to compete with.

The last thing we would want is to host fonts for everyone to link to, only to at some point (after google have beaten us) be forced to turn them off – destroying your website designs.

So as not do disappoint you in the future, we have decided to stop now. Have no fear though – we will be back! We are hatching a new plan for font-face.com – stay tuned!

font-face.com will still be the home of everything font-face, just not in the original way it was intended.

Thanks

The font-face.com Team x x

My first reaction was “Dang. I was so looking forward to this service. Darn Google. I have only just recently received requests from google to donate fonts to a new project Font Directory. It will probably take forever”.

The very next day, today, I discovered that Google has come out with Font Previewer that makes adding  new fonts to your site as simple as copy/pasting a few lines of code.

Google added an option to preview the fonts from the Google Font Directory. Before embedding the code, you can edit the sample text, change text size and spacing, capitalize the text, add underlines and shadows.

“The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers,” explains Google.