Whoa. How does this work?

One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours, of course.

A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many unfortunately.

(we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx).

  > Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste. Below are a selection of brand fonts with which you can do exactly that. Enjoy.

I really like the style of copying the “google tool” style that this website and jmail use. It makes the project feel different compared to all the ai-generated app these days.

Is there any difference between Source Serif and Source Sans as listed here and the publicly available versions, given they are open source typefaces?

Would be really good if Google Docs could support custom brand fonts by letting their customers upload them in the admin console.

I knew about this for Google’s own fonts but had no idea they offered the option to use custom fonts. Is there any easy place to find a list of them? I wonder if the custom fonts are just hardcoded/pushed to their CDN alongside all the other ones.

Surprised that such font access isn't gated by IP address --- usually font licenses are quite restrictive and have such requirements for usage.

Any idea how did the creator manage to get access to the fonts in the first place? Won't you need a Google Docs document which uses the given font and then copy it from there and put it up on the website? Or is there some way the creator could have put these fonts on his website from publicly available information?

Received DMCA takedown notices for a paid font I used for my wife’s interior design website that she liked but we didn’t pay for because…I’m lazy.

I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy.

They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed.

I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font!

Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.