Looking for some custom fonts that are free and web-ready? Google has 501 different fonts available on its
Web Fonts project. You download the fonts you want in a zipped archive, or use them directly from the web on your own site.
The Google Web Fonts project is a huge cache of 501 different font families. Each font can be added to your own personal collection that’s linked to your Google account. From there, you can directly download fonts in your collection or get the code to use them on your site.
To download your selected fonts, just use the download button and then you’ll receive them in a compressed zip archive. At that point all you have to do is extract them and they are ready for use. However, if you’ll only be using Google’s fonts on the web, press “Use” button instead.
If you use Google’s web fonts on your site, there is a handy calculator to show you how loading the fonts will impact site performance in terms of page load time. When considering page load time, this gauge would show that the less fonts you use the better your site will perform.
Once you’ve selected which fonts you want, you can then select which type of Google-generated code you want to use. This code fetches the fonts from Google’s web fonts repository whenever a new visitor comes to your site, and makes the font appear visually on your pages.
Alternatively, if you want to download all of the fonts at once, you can with Mercurial. However, I don’t recommend doing this unless you absolutely want every single font. The files total to 1.3GB in size and it takes a long time to download. You’ll also need to install a GUI for Mercurial, such as
TortoiseHG. Google has the
full instructions here.
That’s all there is to it! Enjoy your new fonts courtesy of Google.
