Does your blog need a bit of style to perk it up? You can add some typographic style to your blog posts with web fonts. For years, web developers could only use the fonts that were installed on our readers’ computers. And, that meant one of the handful of fonts included on both Mac AND Windows computers. As web technology improved, web fonts were developed to provide a way to make fonts available regardless of the local fonts installed on your computer. There are a number of subscriber services offering web fonts and Google has a growing collection of fonts available at no charge.
Pay a visit to Google’s Web Fonts site and you’ll see a huge font catalog. This view only shows a word, but the tabs at the top of the catalog let you see the fonts in sentence, paragraph and poster view. On the left, you can limit your view to specific categories and even search for particular font families. The site provides detailed information on building a font collection and configuring your site to use them. Note that you can also download these fonts to use in non-web projects. Here are a couple of examples.
It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. We are tenants, not possessors, lovers and not masters.
It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. We are tenants, not possessors, lovers and not masters.
It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. We are tenants, not possessors, lovers and not masters.
~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
If you’re hosting your own WordPress blog, you’ll find a number of plugins making it even easier to use web fonts. WP Google Fonts is easy to use and allows you to include up to six custom fonts on your site. In this example, I’ve set up one of the Josefin fonts for use in all my paragraphs and lists.
Once the plugin is installed, you’ll find a new Google Fonts section added to your Settings. Here you’ll select the fonts you want to use and assign them to the element(s) within your post where they will be used. The plugin allows you to assign up to six fonts. Here I’ve used the Josefin font for most of the text within each post. I could choose a handwriting font for use in blockquotes to make them stand our or I could set up decorative headings if that’s what I wanted. Make your font and assignment choices and hit the Save button. That’s it! If you don’t like the results, change them until you do.
WordPress.com users can take advantage of web fronts from Typekit as part of their Custom Design package. Blogger users can include Google’s web fonts on their blog by following the instructions at the font site. Regardless of platform, the effort required to add fonts to your site is minimal and the rewards are impressive. The most difficult part of all this is deciding which fonts to use.
