Google Fonts and Adobe Edge Web Fonts have made websites more interesting and engaging with the multitude of open source fonts, but the more fonts used, the slower a website loads. To compensate for this, web fonts are usually modified and compressed. Brick means to change this with their motto, “Webfonts that actually look good.” They serve fonts in WOFF format that are clones of the originals. It also helps that they are served through Fastly’s CDN and supported by Linode.
You can see a comparison of font rendering between Brick and Google on the Brick Github page, which also details how to compare the rendering between the two font services.
Currently there is only a subset of the available open source web fonts at Brick; you can preview them in the font catalogue. A URL builder is planned which will make using them easier.
How to Use Brick Fonts
The general format to add the font stylesheet is:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//brick.freetls.fastly.net/Font+Name:weights[:flags]/Font+Name...">
You would add this to your website <head>.
Let’s say you want to use Alegreya and Alegreya Sans, and you want to use medium (400) and bold (700) weights of Alegreya for headings. You also want to use Alegreya Sans in lighter medium and bold weights in both normal and italic for the body type – 300,300i,700,700i.
The stylesheet link would be:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//brick.freetls.fastly.net/Alegreya:400,700/Alegreya+Sans:300,300i,700,700i">
Note that you use the font name, as listed in the catalogue, with a + between words in the font name. There is a / to separate the different fonts, and the weights are listed after a colon after each font name.
How to Use Brick Webfonts in WordPress
In WordPress, it’s best to enqueue the web font stylesheet in your functions.php. You would add this:
<?php
// Note: Add only code below to your functions.php
// Enqueue Font Styles
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'my_enqueue_scripts' );
function my_enqueue_scripts() {
wp_register_style( 'my_brick_fonts', '//brick.freetls.fastly.net/Alegreya:400,700/Alegreya+Sans:300,300i,700,700i' );
wp_enqueue_style( 'my_brick_fonts' );
}
How to Add the Font CSS to Your Child Theme
Now you can add the CSS to your child theme styles.css.
body {
font-family: 'Alegreya Sans', sans-serif;
font-weight: 300;
}
strong {
font-weight: 700;
}
h1,
h2,
h5,
h6 {
font-family: Alegreya, serif;
font-weight: 400;
}
h3,
h4 {
font-family: Alegreya, serif;
font-weight: 700;
}
Note that the font name in the stylesheet is as listed in the catalogue, but with quotes around it.
There are many choices for using open source web fonts to add interest to your WordPress website.
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