Update on the state of open-source webfonts

[alfredxing]

I was going to post this a few weeks ago, and @larsschwarz just reminded me in #105.

I'm not exactly sure when everything happened, but here's a rough timeline from what I gathered:

• March 15, 2014: Brick launches (mainly on Hacker News).
• Summer/Fall 2014: Google starts serving its fonts in WOFF2 format and drastically improves font rendering (not sure of the time frame; I hadn't noticed until Performance Concerns - WOFF2 #99).
• July 17, 2014: Chrome 37, with DirectWrite support on Windows, releases in the beta channel.
• August 26, 2014: Chrome 37 is released in the stable channel.

In other words, whether Brick has been an influence or not (we probably will never know—unless someone knows somebody at Google who can tell us?), the quality of Google Fonts in all modern browsers is now more or less satisfactory. This is a huge win for the realm of open-source webfonts, and as I mentioned in #105, I applaud Google for making these changes.

Brick will continue to fully operate and grow. However, since I'm busier now with more school and an internship over the summer, I won't have as much time to work on the project. I will, though, pick up development if I (or some of you) feel that webfonts need improving again.

Finally, I'd like to thank all of the contributors to the project so far, all of the font designers who contributed countless hours to crafting these gorgeous fonts, Fastly and Linode for their ongoing support.

Oh, and some quick stats:

• 120 million requests made since launch
• Around 100,000 unique visitors per day
• Used by Playlist.com and Buffer's blog (buffersocial), which make up the majority of traffic
• More than 5000 sites using Brick in the past 30 days alone

Thanks for making all of this work!
Alfred

Postscript. I'm still working on that redesign. It's not anywhere near completion but I am still working on it.

[alfredxing]

Also: if you still think Google Fonts is not "fixed" yet, just say so! (A screenshot would help.)

[davelab6]

I am responsible for the font onboarding at Google Fonts, although I work with Google as a consultant, not an employee, and thus only represent myself and not any of my consulting clients including Google :)

The GF collection is maintained publicly at http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/ and you can see that no major update to rendering has been done in the last few years; you are right that Chrome's support for DirectWrite has improved web fonts rendering substantially, but that's the only change. (Well, GF and others have funded www.freetype.org/ttfautohint which can help even further, and is used on all the newest releases, but has not been retroactively applied to the majority of the collection.)

On influence, Brick hasn't come up in any meetings I've attended, and I believe TypeKit started serving CFF versions of display fonts to Windows to trigger the smooth edge rendering mode - http://blog.typekit.com/2011/09/01/postscript-comes-to-typekit/ - but so far this idea hasn't met the time/impact bar for the GF engineering team. However, I've been aware of the project since it launched and kept an eye on it, and you've been doing a great job!! :)

[alfredxing]

@davelab6 Thanks for weighing in on this! I was thinking maybe it was something to do with the TTF to WOFF/WOFF2 conversions or the script Google uses to generate the stylesheets (the default generated CSS looks very different than it did before)?

I was aware of the Typekit change and was debating whether Brick should use OpenType outlines. It's not so much a concern now since Chrome has had DirectWrite support for a while.

Anyhow, the difference between the preview pages (Google Fonts versus Brick) is almost nonexistent now (at least on my machine).

[alfredxing]

Update on stats: the total requests number is 120M as of today. I've updated this above as well.