One of my favorite Google features got a facelift and a major upgrade this week. Google Web Fonts makes it easy to stretch your typographic design far beyond the limitations of the basic, old school, web-friendly fonts of the world wide web.

Today the Web Fonts kit graduates from the Google codebase to the big G at google.com/webfonts/v2 and adds a suitcase for you to collect and easily reference your favorite fonts. And there are now 180 font families to choose from.

As I ecstatically posted last year:

Now we’ve got the quickest shortcut to open-licensed, cross-platform fonts since… well it’s only been a few months since a bunch of designers and typographers got together to develop the Web Open Font Format, a soon-to-be-standardized font specification that wraps core web fonts (including Apple’s TrueType and Microsoft’s OpenType) into an encoded, embeddable file. Google also partnered with TypeKit to offer the Web Font Loader, offering more flexibility.

That’s not all Google updated today — the new homepage top nav bar gives it a slick Android 3.0 look and feel. On top of that — the announcement of Google+, currently in closed beta.

How to use Google Web Fonts in your WordPress blog:

This week’s Google I/O keynote fiesta brought plenty of big, exciting, game-changing announcements, but nothing more immediately exciting to me than the launch of the Google Font API (Read Google’s blogpost). Suddenly adding sleek, new fonts to any web page is as easy as visiting the Google Font Directory, copying, pasting, and voila.

There are a few key reasons why I’m so excited about this and I’ll elaborate a bit below:

1. The fonts are all open source-licensed
2. It works on all current browsers (cross-platform)
3. The fonts are cool and the possibilities are endless

There might be hundreds of fonts pre-installed on your Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite software, but only a fraction of these will be recognized by most web browsers. Standards take time to develop and our perception of time in the web era is ridiculously skewed. It’s been less than 15 years since Netscape 2.0 became the first widely used browser to support tags in the first place! 1995 was also the year that the first standard HTML spec was published (HTML 2.0) and around the same time momentum started building for a CSS standard. In the earliest days of the web as we know it, it was all Times New Roman all the time.