Today we are excited to announce a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API to make them available to everybody on the web. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

Well, this was unexpected. All the buzz about font-face, and then Google goes off and does something totally awesome like this. I definitely like the simplicity and scope of this over font-face. I just wish there were more open source fonts.

We’ve added a fair bit to Blogger over the years, but one thing that’s been constant for some time has been our collection of templates. While a number of talented designers around the web have offered their own fresh and interesting designs that you can apply to your Blogger blog, our stock set has grown a bit stale, and you’ve noticed. You let us know — in the forums, on Twitter, sitting next to us on airplanes, even from across the counter at a Harvard Square stationary store, and we’ve been listening.

Today we’re taking a big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog.

Long overdue, but it looks pretty good. It seems as if they copied the layout UI that Posterous uses for customizing a blogs design. They've got a lot of great color schemes to pick from and it offers an incredibly level of granularity over the layout. It's unclear to me why it takes the Blogger team forever to roll out new features. I would have thought that post-Goolge acquisition they would have the resources to roll things out on a more regular basis. WordPress pushes out new features at least twice a year, while it seems to take Blogger a year to add what are not considered basic features for blogging platforms.

There is one thing that's rather peculiar though—why is 'Impact' a font choice? That's got to be a bug or a joke. I can't imagine that anyone thought that was a good idea.

In 2009, a small team lead by Mark Shuttleworth, conducted a review of our key brand values and identity. Based on that work, a set of visual treatments were produced, and shared with key members of the Ubuntu Art community, spanning the core distributions, derivatives, and aligned efforts like the Forums. Representatives from Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, SpreadUbuntu and more came to London and worked with the Canonical design team to refine the designs and work together. The results of that work are presented here.

Ubuntu rose to be the number one consumer Linux distribution pretty much since the day it was released, and it's no wonder why—it's the only distribution that even bothers thinking about design. It's nice to see how far come, but I feel like a lot of the roadblocks that will continue to prevent mainstream adoption are a result of focusing on the design elements that have to do with how the operating system looks and feels, and ignoring the design elements that have to do with how the operating system itself functions.

That being said, look and feel is a big part of getting people in the door, and stepping away from the brown humanistic theme is a giant leap forward. That theme was simple atrocious. Who thought that was a good idea in the first place?