July 9th, 2011 Try the New Google Web Font Directory !

It’s amazing how many cool products Google can produce in one day. Here is a new interface for viewing Google Web Fonts. Link to the new version appeared in the old interface (above). At the moment, the directory contains 180 sets of web fonts. All fonts are free and can be easily integrated into any page.

Developers are not only updated the interface but added several useful features, which they were asked for, including the ability to preview any given text, character by character comparison and display page load times.

The interface is designed on the results of usability tests of users group. It turned out that when choising font, users often have a particular way of using it. Therefore, in the fontbrowser three common variants of previewing and comparing fonts were added: 1) word, 2) sentence and 3) paragraph. When you select either option the font size and window size of the preview will be automatically changed, so that the screen will contain more fonts.

Fonts preview filter was added in the new interface, it will filter by width/thickness, regardless of the nominal font characteristics. That is one version of the font in Bold may be thinner than a different font in the standard version, but when choosing fonts on the screen there are always several fonts with the same thickness. This feature is based on technology TypeDNA.

In the last step, you can copy ready snippets for each font to embed them in CSS to your page. At the same time Google shows speed indicator of loading page, depending on the number of fonts that are loaded with the page.

You can use the free Google Fonts API to implement web fonts from Google Web Fonts.