#FF00AA

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 served by Google servers.

This is pretty cool. Count on Google to optimize the code, and the binary downloads, better than anyone else; and the best news of all is that they are handling the whole license mess, and you don’t have to worry about anything if you’re using those web fonts.

But then, the point of web fonts is to personalize user experience, and how personalized will it really be when all sites use the same couple dozen fonts? (Even assuming that they expand the catalog over time.)

And, more importantly, I’m not convinced that web fonts are really that ready for public consumption — it appears that all browsers are standardizing on just hiding the text while its custom font loads, and that’s already happened to me a couple of times while browsing and I found it really annoying (it’s just awkward to have a blog post load, then its headings pop up ten seconds later).

On the other hand, if everyone starts using Google’s free fonts, everyone will have them in their browser’s cache already. So maybe we should really encourage it.

P.S. Ooh, scratch that: Introducing the WebFont Loader in Collaboration with Typekit. A JavaScript library that apparently allows developers to decide what the browser does while it’s loading your custom font. If it works well (and I have no reason to think it wouldn’t), that’s awesome.