Web typography so far has been a stunted and unlovely thing. Conflicting standards and licensing issues have prevented designers from deploying their typographic chops. For years now choices have been limited to the familiar faces of the Microsoft Core Fonts collection.

CSS has supported linking to fonts for years but cross-browser support for font formats has been patchy and unpredictable – however the days of Font Frustration are already behind us with superb initiatives like Typekit and, focus of this post, Google Web Fonts…

Google Web Fonts is a growing collection of open-source, freely distributable fonts which are hosted on Google’s servers. The Google Web Fonts front page has previews of all the fonts but also has a really useful Font Preview tool where you can enter representative copy and experiment with tracking and leading – also, CSS3 drop shadows.

When you’ve refined the look of your type Google Web Fonts generates a block of link code for you to insert into your HTML pages and a CSS declaration block to be added to your CSS files. Once you’ve linked to the Google Web font you get a embedded web fonts that look the same in most browsers (including IE!).

This site uses the Muli face by Vernon Adams.