 I wanted to start by clarifying that I work for Google as a consultant, and so the presentation today is very much my own work, my own opinions, and doesn't represent the views of Google or any other of my consulting clients. So Google Fonts is a service that provides hundreds of web fonts, which are free, open source, and made for the web. And a web font is a font that's loaded as part of a web page's design. In the past, then we were restricted to using web-safe fonts, fonts which were generally installed on people's computers. And often different systems had different fonts that were somewhat similar, so they were grouped together. And so this led to rather boring typography on the web. So here's an example of this where the typography of this magazine article, the line length is very long, the titles, they're not really distinguished very clearly. And the quality, the richness of the web is just not there as compared to something like a printed magazine. So when people wanted to use custom fonts in this kind of richer typography, then they would often do it with an image. You can see this is an image, it's not real text. And this can even be complete pages of text. So this is the ePaper, the Jagran ePaper, and you can see that this is all just images of the printed paper placed on the web. And then this is another Indian newspaper, and their mobile site, and you can see the whole text here is an image, which means that it can be very slow to load. You can't find it yourself, if you're searching in the page, it's not going to work. Similarly, search engines cannot index that content easily. Other services that rely on the text being real Unicode text won't work. So speech reading for people with vision problems won't work, translation tools won't work. So it's very frustrating that before web fonts you had this choice between real text with plain typography or more rich typography that didn't really work very well. And again, for Indian languages, the problems were especially tricky. So a lot of text in the DTP print error was not Unicode, and the text was tied to a specific font, which meant that you could use the font, but the text was just kind of, yeah, it seems like nonsense text, even though visually it might work. So web fonts is this relatively new feature of web browsers, and it's now supported by over 90% of browsers, and the latest ones, it's nearly across the board. So this kind of happened in around 2008, and there was a startup Typekit that launched, which has since been acquired by Adobe, that provides a collection of web fonts as a service, and this takes away some of the complexity and technical issues around using web fonts. So this is an example of Wired Magazine's web typography, and again, this is quite a plain magazine example, but you can see how the titles, by using a web font, have that little bit more quality feeling to them, and the typography in general is more refined. And so some web publications are really taking this to the next level. So this is a feature in Rolling Stones Magazine, and the kind of feeling of the experience of this really is a kind of digital equivalent of reading a very nice printed magazine. And the use of fonts is essential to go with the images, the colors, the rest of the design, the interactive parts, the videos. So having rich typography on the web that's as good as a printed magazine is now possible. So I'd like to highlight there's a very nice tool called Watt font. It's a plugin for the Chrome browser, and it allows you to click a little icon in your toolbar, and then you can see what fonts are being used and where they come from. So as you see typography improving on the web, you can learn a little bit about what those fonts are and where they come from, something that's not possible in print. So Google Fonts. Google Fonts provides many, many fonts for Latin. And the concept of this has been very much to provide minimum viable product fonts. So there are some showcases that show off what can be done with Google Fonts in Latin. And there's an increasing quality of the collection over time. And so this has led to the fonts being very popular. So the Google Fonts page has an analytics area where you can see the total number of font views since the project started. And this is a big number. So you can have a web page without videos, but you can't have a web page without text. The most viewed video on YouTube is the Gangnam style music video. And that's been seen over 2 billion times. But the most popular font on Google Fonts, OpenSans, has been seen over 500 billion times. So Web Fonts is really still just at the beginning, though. So the Alexa Top 1000 websites rank is analyzed by the HTTP archive. And so this shows trends over the Top 1000 sites. You can see things improving, the size of CSS, the richness of design is increasing over time. And they have this graph showing sites with custom fonts. And so you can see that now it's around 45% of the Top 1000 sites on the web are using custom fonts, which means that it's less than half. So that's with the Top 1000 websites, which are mostly in English. So Google is increasingly considering how to reach the next billion people. And Indian users don't have enough fonts available on the web to create content with rich typography in the languages of their prime. The next 300 million internet users in India won't use English. That's why we're working on enabling the internet in Indian languages, which is the key to driving growth. Sadra Jan Anandan, the managing director of Google India. And the demographics on this is that many people in India can read, but much less can read English. And the future of the Indian web is not going to be in English. So traditional Indian kind of DTP era fonts, there's many, many fonts designs out there. But they need to be redesigned for Unicode and improved. So Google Fonts has an early access page, where some of these earlier fonts that are available as Libra fonts are available quickly. But not all the features of the Google Fonts service are included. So here is Bhaskar.com. And you can see that they are using. So the Bhaskar.com site is using web fonts now. So this is real text. But the design of the Latin and Devanagari has not really been harmonized. The weight, the vertical height, they're not really designed together. So I was very lucky that when I was studying in England, I was able to attend the University of Redding's typeface design program. And this is one of the leading institutions in the world where they are encouraging designers to think about global type design and to design typefaces where the Latin and the Greek, the Cyrillic, and other global scripts are designed together. And so this is leading to a new batch of type designers around the world who are designing new fonts, which are high quality and being made for the web. So I want to do a very fast demonstration of how easy it is to use a web font on a web page. So you go to the Google Fonts site, which is google.com, slash fonts. And then you select the writing system, in this case, Devanagari. And you find a font which you'd like to use. And you add it to your collection. You can compare fonts in the collection in the review area and decide which ones you want to use. And then on the Use page, you get the code to insert into your HTML page. So I made an example earlier in case that was a problem. There we go. So you insert the code into the top of the page. And then you have a little piece of CSS where you name the font family that you've added to the page, and it becomes available. So Google Fonts has help information about this to get started. And there's many articles around the web about using typography. This is very much a growing trend. And the reason that typography is important is that it drives behavior. So this article mentioned a famous study done by a documentary maker. And he printed a text, an article, and he asked people to tell him whether they thought the article was true or not. It was an ambiguous topic. It was about asteroids. And asteroids killed the dinosaurs. And so we are at risk of that. The asteroids, an asteroid could hit the planet and it could be a disaster for us. And should we worry about that? Is that something that we should be concerned about? Maybe yes, maybe no. So having the article set in different fonts, people who had read the article in the Baskerville font said that they agreed with the article more often than people who read the font of the article in Comic Sans. And so we have a kind of visceral reaction to letters that the letter form shape our perception and our feeling about things. And this is kind of, in a way, subliminal. So if you want to know more about typography, which I encourage you to do so, one of my favorite top recommendations for beginners who are not visual designers but are becoming involved and need to do typography and make typography decisions is the non-designers designed in typebook. There's also a web project I've been involved in called Open Educational Resources for Typography. And this provides a textbook at a university level about typography. And it's available kind of freely in a kind of Wikipedia way so that you can read it. And if you want to contribute changes or ask questions, you can do so on the GitHub collaboration platform. So I think that in introducing richer typography to your documents or your applications on the web, you can do A-B testing. You can kind of scientifically see the effect of typography on your users. And I think that's very exciting. So there's an increasing need for new fonts. Increasing need for new fonts in Google's providing a small collection that's growing. But there's always going to be a need for more fonts and new fonts. They simply just aren't enough today. So Fontforge is a free font editor that anyone can use to get started. And the Fontforge community has developed a design with Fontforge Book, which is starting to create another kind of free textbook for people to learn. There's also the Indic Fontbook project, which provides more technical details about creating Indian language fonts. And there are the discussion forums online. So there's a Google font directory discussion group where designers who are making these fonts are asking for reviews of that work, posting their early sketches, and their work in progress. And there are also other forums around the web, more generally for type design, with critique boards so that you can post your work in progress and get feedback. There's a very famous Google font called the Lobster font. And that was developed by a designer in Argentina entirely in this way, where he had never made a font before. This was his first font. And by posting work and asking for reviews, he was able to improve it in an iterative process. So my colleague, Atom here, has recently kind of become interested in type design. And he'd like to say a little bit about why he feels type design is important in this region. Thanks, Dave. So just picking up from where he stopped the presentation, I'll just dive into quickly what something he mentioned, like split, like A-B testing. So when you think about India Sri Lanka, like Indian languages and scripts to like, in order to do a split test on fonts, we don't have that much fonts to test. So basically, we need more and more fonts to build a richer experience for the users. And the most of the designs that like different examples they have demonstrated, they are using these like different typographic styles to sort of take across a certain message. If you remember the test with basketball and comic sans, you need to have these different fonts with different styles to take this, like have this rich typographic experience for users in this region as well. So for that, it's really important to get like more native speaking, native designers working on the fonts. Because as native speakers, as native readers, we have sort of an edge compared to the designers working from the West because we have seen the script, we are familiar with the scripts, and we know to how extent we can sort of modify certain elements and to certain how far we can go with the script. So this is really important when we think about type design. And also, I'd like to talk about the licensing or how the Libre fonts works. So the collection on the Google Fonts, everything is licensed under open fonts license, basically a Libre license that enables anybody to use a font without virtually any restriction for commercial use, and they can even distribute it. And the most interesting part of this license for me is that you can modify a font to sort of suit your certain needs. So say if you are working on this specific product for a fashion company, and you're using this specific font, and you don't like some certain elements of the font, and you need to change or sort of modify, maybe add a certain graphical element into the font. So basically, the OFL license allows you to do these changes and host this font for yourself and use it without any restrictions. There are small restrictions like you can't use the original name of the font, but that's OK, I think, compared to a proprietary font where you can't do anything. So I think this is really important for economies like India because we have limited resources put into design and marketing budgets. So when it comes to these efforts, like promoting design and improving design quality, the Libre Movement and shared knowledge, shared resources can be really helpful for countries like Sri Lanka, India, and our region. So to conclude, the growth of the web in the next few years I think is going to be really astonishing. The growth of these kinds of $50 US phones, efforts like the Android One project Google is doing, is going to lead to, this phone was $50 this year, so next year it'll be maybe $30, the year after that maybe $20, the year after that maybe $10. And over the next short time, everyone on the planet who has a job is going to have an internet phone. And so that's going to happen a lot faster than those people are going to learn English. And so the need for websites and web applications to be localized and to have typography that's as good as it is in English for all the world's languages is important.