They should call it "reward," not "donate." These guys produced something valuable, we aren't giving them cash for nothing. I wish they lose the "donate" word in all situations like this (free software, etc.).
I think they should use whatever verb results in the highest conversion rates. Who cares about semantics -- it's more important that the designers are getting paid.
These look a lot better than when Google first came out with the font API. The selection is pretty good now, and seems like a great free alternative to Typekit.
FYI with Typekit you'll need to use 'mo bulletproof' instead of the default supplied demo CSS, otherwise your fonts won't show on Android (due to an Android bug).
Typekit got in contact: they don't use the Paul Irish 'bulletproof' syntax that has the bug (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3200069/css-fonts-on-andr...). They serve separate stylesheets to separate browsers - sorry, I have my font services confused!
I don't want to rain on the parade, but I can't believe there is no search box! :) On the other hand, great selection of fonts, and betting on Google not being down is probably safer than betting any other font service not being down.
Is that specific to webfonts implemented this way or the known difference between Windows and other systems? (The Windows font render tweaks its processing to force greater alignment with the pixel grid, to improve the sharpness of the output, where other font renderers are more accurate in their stroke positioning but this can lead to things looking more "fuzzy" (and, depending on your monitor's settings, darker)
For now I am still not keen on webfonts, as my primary language is Chinese, which, even using simplified form, would need at least 1000 popular characters. Unless there is a even more dynamic way to load fonts by splitting font characters by usage frequency, it would be a no-go for that (who uses webfonts in the size of megabytes?)
There are tools which allow you to subset fonts, splitting them up by character, so you could, say, produce a font containing only those characters that you have in your headlines for you headline font. For example, Font Squirrel http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator will allow you to chose particular characters to include in your subset; though that's not very useful unless you really only need a handful of characters that you can enter manually.
It's true that for practical reasons, web fonts are less useful for CJK characters than they are for languages with smaller character sets. I imagine someone will write tools to make it a little easier to deal with, but it may not ever be as convenient as for other writing systems.
Well I am aware that this is possible, but only useful if I can somehow "combine" subsets into one single font. I have not yet devoted time to see if this is actually possible right now, though.
Say I have the lists of usage frequency for my target language (say Simplified Chinese) and then I want the most used 60% in subset A and other 40% on subset B. But at the end I need to have 100% applied to the same font, which doesn't seem possible without some javascript mangling by looking up the text to apply the correct subset ...
Looks like they changed the name. http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-web-fonts-... says "To make it easier for all, we’re also pleased to announce a re-branding of the “Google Font Directory” to “Google Web Fonts.” The service is now available via the simple, memorable URL: www.google.com/webfonts ."
It seemed to work for me. Either they pulled another "bad" font, or a recent Ubuntu update (according to the Google bug it's a pango update) fixed the root cause.
