Beautify your blog with the Google Font API

Sick and tired of using Arial, Verdana and Georgia on your blog? Ok, I must admit, I love Georgia and I’ve been using it for years but after a while you want something else. There simply aren’t enough websafe fonts that look good and are compatible. There are several solutions like replacing the header with images (SEO-FAIL!) or Flash (mobile, anyone?) and more recently Typekit. I got a Typekit account months ago but never got around to implementing it because it looked so cumbersome. And now, our friend Google, released the Google Font API and it’s foolproof. Even though Typekit has way more fonts the simplicity of the Google Font API is wonderful.

Their instructions on how to use their fonts on your website are in plain English but here’s the translation to WordPress:

  1. Add a stylesheet link to request the desired web font(s) in your theme’s header.php:
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
    href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name">
  2. Style an element with the requested web font in your stylesheet, eg. custom.css:
    h1 { font-size:2.4em;  font-family: 'Droid Sans', arial, serif;}

That’s it! Writing this blogpost took me longer than implementing new, lovely fonts on my blog.

5 thoughts on “Beautify your blog with the Google Font API

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