For many of you out that who are still wondering “why should I use Google fonts” or even “what are web fonts?” well this article will go over some of the very basic yet essential reasons to start using them.
For the Longest time the web was lacking when it came to the selection of fonts that could be used safely on the web. When I say safely I mean that you could use only the fonts that someone had installed on their computer on your website. This was a problem that went unsolved for many years and many designers learned to deal with it but were always left wanting.
The main alternative that web designers had when working with non web safe fonts was using images. There are many reasons why using images for font replacement was bound to fail. Images will weigh down your website, will not translate to other languages and are bad for Search Engine Optimization. Designers learned to bite the bullet when using images as font replacement for the sake of beauty. For years this was standard that is until web fonts came into the picture.
To put it simple, what Google fonts now allows is for web designers and web developers to create websites, web applications, blogs, etc. with fonts that people don’t need to have installed on their computers. Using a very simple process of linking to one of Google’s fonts in their library, you are able to display a beautiful custom font throughout the interwebs!