Google Docs puts design font and center

Google added a whopping collection of 450 fonts to its online document service Google Docs today — thus freeing your text from years of enslavement by the likes of Arial, Courier New, and the universally reviled Comic Sans.

Well, you know what Comic Sans? We’ll just see how comical you are within a sea of equally goofy font options now available to co-workers, friends, and family members who have zero grasp of basic design principles.

Google Docs users can add the new font styles by clicking on the font menu in the tool bar and selecting the “Add fonts” option at the very bottom. From there you’ll see the entire menu of web fonts available, such as Economica, Princess Sofia, Jolly Lodger, Happy Monkey, Dynalight, Wallpoet, Lobster one, Lobster two, and Esteban. All of your chosen fonts are displayed alphabetically in a sidebar to the right. You can click the “X” to remove any font you don’t plan on using. That sidebar will then appear in the “font styles” tool bar when you’re working within a doc.

Even with all these fresh new font options, it’s possible that bland white document background isn’t doing for you anymore. Thankfully, Google has added over 60 new document templates for you to choose from.

The full list of Google Docs updates is listed below, via the Google Docs blog:

• Google Drive launched as a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all your stuff.
• There are now a few more options for inserting images in Docs, including inserting from Google Drive, searching for images from the LIFE Photo archive, or taking a snapshot with your webcam.
• Charts in spreadsheets now has support for minor gridlines and options to customize the formats of axis labels
• Accessibility in Docs got better with support for screenreaders in presentations and with the addition of NVDA to our list of supported screenreaders.
• From File > Page setup… you can now set the default page size for your new documents.
• It’s now easier for speakers of right-to-left languages by automatically showing bidirectional controls when you type in a language that might use them.
• Apps Script had many improvements, including
  • A new ScriptService for programmatically publishing your scripts and controlling when they run.
  • A new function to find the root folder of someone’s Drive.
  • An increase in the allowed attachment size in emails from 5MB to 25MB.
  • An increase in the size of docs files you can create from 2MB to 50MB.
• There are now over 60 new templates in our template gallery.