Drupal's @Font-Your-Face - Google fonts and more

On May 19th, the first day of the annual Google I/O developers conference, Google came out with another break-through announcement to the web development world – web fonts would now be freely accessible through the Google Font API and the Google Font Directory. On May 20th, Drupal released a Google Fonts module that enables Drupal website developers and administrators to take advantage of these newly available web fonts. Time to market – about 24 hours. Most would agree that such a quick response is very impressive, but for some reason Drupal developers are never satisfied.

The Google announcement had planted a seed. It started fellow Colorado Drupal developer, Scott Reynen, thinking about more. No doubt, the Google Font Directory was a great first step, but with less than 20 font families, it just doesn’t contain enough quality fonts to satisfy most serious design professionals. Other sites provide hundreds of free web font families, but they were not accessible through an API (Application Programming Interface) that would enable access directly from Drupal. So Scott went to work. He contacted several prominent free web font providers and helped them develop their own standards based API. This would enable one common interface, @Font-Your-Face, to pull all available fonts into Drupal.

Brilliant! No more hopping from one web font site to another in order to hunt down the font you want to use. All available fonts would now be available through this common interface.

So, in just a couple of weeks since the Google announcement, the @Font-Your-Face module was released with access to Google Fonts, FontSquirrel and KERNEST, making well over 700 fonts available within Drupal. And, the API development of two additional providers is in progress. I imagine it won’t be long before every web font out there is available through Drupal, thanks to @Font-Your-Face.

To learn how easy it is to use @Font-Your-Face, check out this entertaining video: