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Yes, that’s free as in free. No account necessary. Just select a typeface on Google Fonts, click Try it in Typecast, and in two seconds you’ll be designing with it on text of any length right there in your browser. Or get there through our Google Showcase.
What’s in and what’s out
Image may be NSFW.
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Our new free demo is a scaled back version of our app, but we’ve left in lots of useful features to make it worth your while. With it you can:
- work with the entire Google Fonts library;
- use our full range of type controls to experiment and build clear, readable type systems – adjusting font size and weight, measure, line-height, and OpenType features as well as testing different typefaces side by side in the editor;
- create more complex and realistic compositions with our floats, clears, margins, and padding controls;
- fine-tune your designs with text and background colors, borders, text shadows and more;
- generate a PNG of your design to share with others or merge with comps and get feedback;
- output your work as CSS and HTML; and
- copy Google’s CSS code from within your project without having to jump to another window, making embedding of their fonts faster.
Of course we’ve held back a few key features just for our devoted subscribers. To save your progress, create multiple projects, create and roll back to previous versions of your designs, access and output our real-time style guide, share your work with others via a public URL, test designs with mobile previews, or design with the 24,000 other typefaces in our collection from Typekit, Fontdeck, Webtype and Fonts.com, you must have a subscription.
Why Google and why now?
Frankly, we think the web could look better and we want our Typecast app to be part of the solution. After all, web fonts have a vital role to play in making the web a more beautiful, readable place.
Since so many designers rely on Google Fonts’ library of free typefaces to learn how web fonts work, develop their skills, and bring more varied and beautiful typography to the web, it was a perfect place to start. Their growing number of solidly designed, readable typefaces (like Merriweather, Lato, PT Sans and PT Serif, Droid Sans, and Ubuntu) just sweetened the idea.
Offering a free version of our design tool to Google Fonts fans is our way of making designing with web fonts more accessible, helping to foster more type lovers, and cultivating more typography experts. We think that’s good for the web, clients, readers and designers everywhere.
Come try out the free demo to see how easy it is to design with any face in the Google Fonts library.
