Google recently unveiled a collection of webfonts free for web designers to embed in their web pages. I've been watching this service for months now and I just gotta say something: The fonts they offer are simply not that great.

OK, there are a few good fonts in the bunch. I like Lobster a lot, it's charming and well-crafted and has a nice swagger to it, and its semi-cursive style is nice alternative to a traditional cursive script. And the Droid font is okay, I guess; it's modern-looking at least somebody put a lot of thought and effort into making this one looks good and smart on-screen. But for the most part, Google's web font offerings are mediocre at best.

Readers of this blog know that I'm a font designer, and I've been making fonts for a living for over 15 years now. I don't claim that my fonts would be any better than the ones featured here, and I know I’m not the best font designer in the world. But I do know the difference between a good font and a bad font. And many of the fonts offered through Google's webfont platform are, well, bad. And to view the overall collection of fonts they offer as a whole, I call it "below average." Looks like just another half-assed freefont website to me.

But it is not just another goofy little freefont website, this is a Google. And Google now has an opportunity to influence the typographic design of millions of websites. With the new webfonts they're taking a leadership role in defining the design and usability of the entire medium.

Unfortunately, with this new collection of fonts, they are doing a disservice to designers, writers and readers worldwide to offer such a weak collection. They are enabling the whole world to use bad fonts in their web pages, free of charge. People will do it, and the written words of the whole world will be a little – or a lot -- uglier because of it.

Not surprising is the technical performance of the Google webfonts: they load pretty fast and rasterize nicely and generally render on-screen as selectable HTML in your web pages the way they're supposed. And many web designers really enjoy the opportunity to offer a wide selection of free web type to their clients through a competent service provider like Google. Speed, free-licensing and technical efficiency certainly are Google's strong suits. Seems like they're still doing all that right.

The service was labelled as "beta" mode yesterday, but now it seems to have officially launched as of today. So the Google team must think this is a good idea. I would've hoped they'd delete about half of the fonts they offer, or maybe more, before the official launch. But now it seems they'll be adding crappy new fonts almost daily instead of removing them. Too bad they didn't find a typographic expert to consult them on how they might obtain some smart, good-lookin' webfonts that don't suck. Because it looks to me like a bunch of engineers over there have put this collection together without consulting anybody with some typographic knowledge as to what a good font selection might look like. 

The failure of these new webfonts is somewhat ironic, considering their successful and creative utilization of the fonts with the Google Doodles.

If you are looking for smart new webfonts, a better solution would be Typekit or Fontspring or MyFonts or Fonts.com or any other font distributor or webfont provider with a design aesthetic. Yeah, you have to pay, but the selection is better, the type is better, and there are some real excellent fonts available through these channels and the prices are fair.

But Google's webfonts are free, and that's what's really gonna help popularize their font selections, and lower the standard for web design in the years to come.

Somewhere in this list, and I don't know where exactly, is the new font to displace Comic Sans as the most-hated font in the world. Thanks to Google, it's only just now getting into the hands of the dumb designers who will popularize it, but I wanted to give you a heads-up to let you know it's coming.

Blecch.