Google today announced a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API and made them available to everybody on the web. As Website Designers and Developers, we’ve had a very short list of fonts we could use for development, otherwise we had to embed them in non-code flat graphic files, which were unreadable by search engines.
Google has apparently been working with a number of font designers to produce a varied collection of open source fonts for the Google Font Directory. Using the Google Font API, these fonts can be added to your web page just like the standard set of “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers. These are cross-browser compatible as long as the browser is CSS3 compliant. (which is all of them, except Internet Explorer… which may have some compatibility depending on IE version).

While this doesn’t give us total control yet to use any custom typeface as web fonts (which is a critical piece for brand consistency), it does give us a bigger set of tools to play with and create a richer web experience. Thanks Google! (view the original Google blog post)