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What Is Google Fonts?

Until recently, web designers could safely use only about a dozen specific fonts: George, Palatino, Times New Roman, Arial, Comic Sans, Impact, Lucida Sans Unicode, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Verdana, Courier and Lucida Console. This standard set of fonts, called web safe fonts, are the ones most likely to be installed on every computer.

The reason this is important is that if you visit a website that uses fonts not installed on your computer, another font will replace it, which can significantly affect the appearance of the site. To get around this significant design limitation and manage a more consistent look, designers would create the font they wanted as an image in another program, such as Photoshop, and then import the image for use as text. This had significant negative repercussions, that we won’t get into here.

Google Fonts to the rescue!
Thanks to Google, web designers are no longer limited to those same 12 fonts. When someone visits a site that uses Google fonts, the site calls for the fonts from Google’s server so the site visitor does not need to have (and won’t have) the fonts installed on their own computer. Now designers can choose from hundreds of different fonts.

Here, for Aviator Event Rentals, we used Google Fonts. The three lines of script under the headings “Rentals for All Occasions,” “Event Planning Tools,” and “Picture Gallery” are pulled from Google’s library.

Aviator Event Rental website - Google Fonts illustration

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