The many advantages of using Google Fonts

When it comes to design, typography plays an important role in communicating a brand. This makes choosing the right font an important part of the design process.

Yet, finding that right typeface can be a daunting challenge. After all, there are thousands and thousands of fonts out there to choose from.

At least until recently, when it came to web design, there used to be a limiting factor at play, as web designers and developer’s choice of fonts was restricted to a small group of web safe fonts. This has now changed, and there is a large selection of web safe fonts available.

So, having greater choices available, where do you start to look for web safe fonts? Well, while there are many font libraries out there, my recommendation is to head straight for Google Fonts. With over 680 font families to choose from, Google Fonts comes with plenty of great perks and features.

Personally, I don’t think you’ll need to look any further. And, if you need a little more convincing, here are a few reasons why Google Fonts is good enough for my design projects.

It’s free to use

The best, if not the most obvious, reason to use Google Fonts over any other service is its zero-cost price tag. Which allows you to select and use any Google font-face for free of charge.

A premium font may give your website an original look, but it will also take a huge chunk from your design budget. Especially if you have to buy in the licence to use a font family, not just for web design, but need to extend the licence for use on mobile devices and print. Even worse, some font licences are priced according to the amount of website visits you receive. If you have a lot of visitors, that can easily add up to quite a sum.

The worst part is that you won’t have the freedom to go back and try out a different font once you make the purchase.

Global cost savings

Working with global charities, we know at all is possible that cost and licences are obviously an important factor. Especially if you consider that, scattered around the world there will be many communication contributors to their campaigns and fundraising projects. If each of these would have to pay for licences, the cost implications would be enormous.

This impacts in particular when it comes to printed materials. For this you have to have the fonts installed on your Mac or PC. With Google Fonts that is no problem. You can download copies of the same fonts you are using online, thereby being able to keep the brand style going across a wide range of media.

Cross platform rendering

Different rendering systems in different browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices can cause font render errors on some devices. This can sometimes mess up the look of the entire website by displaying distorted text.

Thanks to Google’s incredibly fast content delivery network (CDN), you no longer have to worry about those cross-platform issues anymore. Google Fonts now supports all major browsers, as well as a wide range of mobile devices.

No licenses required

As mentioned above, Google Fonts don’t have any restrictions in how you can use them, as they are all released under Open Source license. You are free to select any font in the database and use however many fonts you want. You can download, customise, print, use them on commercial projects and do much more.

Unlimited usage

Unlike most other web font services, Google Fonts doesn’t have a bandwidth or page view limitation. This allows you to use any font on any number of websites with no obligations.

Google Fonts serve billions of pageviews every month for free while other subscription services such as Typekit limits their font use to only 500k page views a month for each website.

Faster loading times

This is yet another bonus: Google Fonts are much more lightweight than other font libraries or self-hosted fonts. Each font has been compressed for speedier download, allowing web pages to download in a split second on any platform, without affecting the font quality.

You can also calculate the best font combinations for your website with the fastest loading time by using the clever font selection dial on Google Fonts.

This article was first posted on: allispossible.org.uk