Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

Google launched a new web-based tool Wednesday that helps you configure, test and easily embed one of the company’s free fonts into your web pages.

The Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons. Once you have the type the way you like it, just copy the provided code and paste it into the CSS.

It’s so ridiculously easy, even I was able to use it to change the h1 style on my personal site in about 2 minutes. I chose Pablo Impallari’s Lobster.

Google first took the web font plunge back in May by releasing the Google Font API and publishing a collection of free, open source fonts anyone can use in their designs for free. It also joined up with Typekit (who released an API today) to put together a JavaScript library for designers to control how and when their fonts are loaded.

The fonts in the Font Previewer are the same ones available through the Google Font API. They are quite nice, with a range of script, serif, sans-serif and monospace typefaces. The various typefaces used on the Android devices (Droid), and the old-timey one from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 site (IM Fell) are part of the package.

Here’s Google’s announcement with some more info.

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