Google Fonts has included Material Design icons in its offer. And it has also announced its intention, “in the future” to add open source icons generally available to its users. What it has not specified is when the new Open Source designs will arrive beyond the new addition.
Google Fonts now offers free open source icons and starts with Material Design icons
The “Material Icons” are open source and available under the Apache 2.0 license. Now Google Fonts users specialized in design can access more resources for their creations.
For graphic designers, Google Fonts offers a free catalog with hundreds of fonts available for the development of web pages and other resources. The goal is to be able to access different fonts when creating new designs. It was launched in 2010 by Google as a kind of online database with open source text fonts, with the idea of being able to use them in millions of web pages around the world, and also to make them available for applications such as Google Docs.
The common thing for brands is to choose a font and always use it so that visually, the user or customer can recognize it by the style. In addition to these fonts, there are also the icons that now increase with the agreement with Material Design.
The fonts available can be downloaded to your computer if you want and, to choose the best one, there is a tool called Better Font Finder by designer Matthew.
A change in the logo
To celebrate the incorporation of Material Design icons, the company has shown its new logo. About the new design, as explained by Tobias Kunisch and SeHee Lee, both designers of this project, have explained that first glance, the new logo can be seen as abstract shapes composed with circles and rectangles, “but if you look closer, you can see various glyphs and icon shapes mixed”.
They say the goal of this new visual branding is to provide “greater design flexibility.”
