Web and mobile typography continued to boom in 2012, with more and more typefaces making their way directly to the browser.

Thanks in no small part to the lovely nerds at Google, web fonts that the consumer doesn’t have to download are now legitimately A Thing. Google’s ongoing Web Fonts project is now home to more than 600 typefaces, all of them free and Internet-friendly.

Also, we’ve got the @font-face rule in CSS3, which makes displaying new and interesting faces directly in the browser much easier on everyone.

Just don’t use fake bolds and italics and we’ll all be fine.

Also, you can check out last year’s mobile/web typography round-up if you’re particularly interested in watching trends change over time — or if you want to pick up some still-hot free typefaces for your work in 2013.

Best font for your new tablet magazine: Noticia

4 fonts | FREE

This @font-face compatible type family (also available from Google Web Fonts) is as versatile as it is legible. For those of you over the age of 25, Noticia will be instantly recognizable as a loving tribute to the news magazine faces of yore. Its ample x-height and sturdy serifs make long blocks of text in those meaty investigative pieces a pleasure to read. Also, Noticia gives you a break in the interior curves of round characters. “While this break makes some interesting forms at large sizes, their true purpose is to help make the counterforms more open at small sizes by allowing straighter stems,” say the creators.

Best new rounded face: Bariol

6 fonts | PAY WHAT YOU WANT

Rounded fonts are one of the design trends we’ve been seeing around the web and various app marketplaces lately. Legible and playful, they’re in keeping with the lighthearted new school of consumer digital products. Bariol is sans and rounded in one, with pleasant weights in regular and italic faces. Plus, the Bariol icon set will greatly expand the vocabulary of your app’s design language. While the font’s creator asks for you to pay whatever you like for the full set, you can also shout out via Twitter or Facebook to get free downloads.

Best web serif: Poly

2 fonts | FREE

Poly was intended to be an academic’s love letter to a South American indigenous language called Wayuunaiki. It ended up being a critically acclaimed Latin serifs and one of the best Google Web Fonts, period. This @font-face compatible typeface is a workhorse for running text, an elegant and subtle substitute for the more common serifs on the web. Plus, its high x-height and abbreviated ascenders make it great for small sizes, even for mobile web use.

Second-best web serif: Quando

1 font | FREE

Inspired by a World War II Italian poster, Quando is a casual serif with the curves to hold your interest in headlines and the low-contrast to look good at small sizes in running text on a mobile device. We’re sad that it doesn’t come with a bold, italic, or other weights to round out the family, but we like where the type designer was going with this.

Best indulgent didone: Valentina

1 font | FREE

So, you want to play around with a sexy, swashy Didone and you’re not too picky about web compatibility? Have we got a font for you. Valentina contains more glyphs than you will ever possibly need — including lowercase alternates and fancy ligatures. This highly decorative face will add a heavy-handed touch of “I worked in print” class to your magaziney apps and single-page sites.

Best new dingbats: Erler Dingbats

12 fonts | FREE

Dingbats have been aching for an update of this caliber for decades. In 800 glyphs, the creators of Erler Dingbats give us the arrows and pointy-fingers we’re used to and more than a few refreshingly modern shapes as well. There’s a Nintendo Wii controller in there, for chrissake. These quick-and-dirty glyphs make sweet U.I. elements for icons, maps, forms, infographics, and even logos. Note to Photoshop purists: You’ll need to use a Glyphs window (such as appears in InDesign) to access the full Dingbat character set.

Best skinny slab: Gleegoo

1 font | FREE

Gleegoo’s name is just about as awkward as it gets, but what it lacks in elegant nomenclature it makes up for in svelte slab serifs and delicate letterforms. It’s a single-font typeface, so don’t look to Gleegoo for all your typesetting needs. Still, as the web rides out the slab serif trend to its faux-Old West grave, it’s nice to see screen-appropriate additions such as this friendly face.

Best new script: Sofia

1 font | FREE

Also available as a Google Web Font, Sofia is a flirty girl with a retro vibe. This upright script is unapologetically feminine, with enough curlicues to confound even the most sadistic roller-coaster designer. And its numeral set is a treat unto itself. Great for logotypes and headlines.

Best hand-lettered face: Oregano

2 fonts | FREE

If you want your site or app to recall the golden age of advertising, look no further than Oregano. This typeface of two fonts (regular and italic) is based on the work of Rand Holub, the guy who literally wrote the book on hand-lettering for commercial design and hand-lettered logos. Oregano is casual and fun without being cartoonish.

Best weird sans for poster-style headlines: Londrina

4 fonts | FREE

This hand-lettered oddball is based on the poster art of São Paulo. “I saw at the start some potential for a typeface that could recall the feelings of the writing used day-to-day in my city’s informal communication and developed it into a typeface family,” writes creator Marcelo Magalhães. The solid font can be combined with shadow, outline, and “sketch” versions of the typeface for different effects; we like it best in all caps. Reminds us of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Best Art Deco throwback: Montserrat

6 fonts | FREE

Vintage is the new modern, and old-timey type is everywhere on the web these days. Montserrat will feed your need for old-school type. This geometric sans takes its inspiration from signs in the historic district of Buenos Aires. It’s available in regular and bold weights with lowercase alternates and an uppercase underlined version.

Best face for diddling around with code: Source Code

6 fonts | FREE

Adobe knows you designers are forcing yourselves into development, and with Source Code, it’s making it a more pleasant experience for everyone. This legible monospace has distinct glyphs for capital I, lowercase l, and the numeral 1. We cannot stress how awesome that is for those who work with code; that announcement alone got an applause break at the Adobe developer conference.

Colophon: All type samples use quotations from the classic newspaper film His Girl Friday, starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant.

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This morning, we learned that O.G. type giant Monotype has acquired Typecast, a newcomer to the type scene and one that’s been making large waves in the webfont pool.

Typecast, which is currently in a public beta, allows web designers and developers to combine and compare different webfonts directly from the browser. The app also generates CSS and HTML code on the fly for designers’ further convenience.

The acquisition was made specifically to bolster Monotype’s position in the world of web design — to give it a stronger product suite for webfonts and to increase its own talent pool of web-focused creatives. Currently, Monotype offers its Fonts.com webfont service as well as SkyFonts, a cloud-based service.

The deal was worth up to $5.1 million; Monotype bought all outstanding Typecast shares, paying $2.6 million in cash, with the remainder due when certain performance goals are met over the next two years.

Here’s a quick look at what Typecast brings to the table:

“The Web has become a critical publishing platform, where brands need to represent themselves with clarity and consistency across connected devices,” said Monotype president and CEO Doug Shaw in a statement on the news.

“We believe Typecast has the potential to take webfonts to a whole new level of productivity and creative expression.”

Typecast employees will continue to work in their current locations, and the shop’s Belfast office will remain its headquarters under Monotype’s leadership.

Top image courtesy of Hasloo Group Production Studio, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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In the months to come, you will start associating the Android mobile operating system with beautiful design, if Matias Duarte, the Chilean-American designer who currently serves as Google’s director of Android user experience, has anything to say about it.

Google’s latest version of the Android OS (called Ice Cream Sandwich), which rolled out earlier this month, represents a drastic new focus on the visual. And a big part of that new aesthetic is Roboto, its custom-built humanist typeface that’s as lovely up-close as it will be on the screen of your mobile device.

“It’s a tremendous accomplishment to develop a typeface in-house and to do it with the constraints we had,” Duarte said in a long chat about the Android redesign. While the team had wanted a new typeface for some time, the Roboto face was designed and shipped within a short 6-month time frame.

The previous default Android system typeface, Droid, was created for different mobile landscape. “The standard Android typeface had been designed for low-res, low-density displays,” said Duarte. “The letters had to be very bold in their character: big strokes, regular rhythm, large x-height. Because at smaller sizes, the entire character is rendered so small that without strong characteristics, it becomes mush.”

The evolution of Android mobile devices is one case where hardware advances influenced design.

“Now, we’re approaching the kind of resolution that you’d get printing on paper,” said Duarte. “Droid was so exaggerated that it used up a lot of space on the page, a lot of leading. It ended up looking like a parody of itself, like a child actor with strong features who grows up to look like a caricature.”

Because the entire Ice Cream Sandwich UI is intended to feel like a glossy magazine, and hence has fewer structural elements, the interface is largely defined by the type. For the purpose of giving Ice Cream Sandwich its soul, most of the humanist faces Duarte and the team looked at weren’t structured enough, he said.

As a result, Roboto evolved to have more in common with a standard print design face like Helvetica than its actual digital predecessor, Droid Sans.

“The most interesting aspect of Roboto is the decision to a straight-sided grotesk,” said Duarte. “The letters o, u, e – they’re not pure geometric circles. They have this racetrack shape. That underlying geometry is what defines Roboto.”

On top of that, the team optimized the typeface to be as elegant in large headlines as it was readable for long spans of running text. “We wanted something as good for body text as a humanist typeface would be,” Duarte said. “We introduced quite a bit of variation in the lowercase letters.”

In the end, Duarte concluded, “I’m personally really delighted with what the team came up with. It has a unique character, you can have a discussion about some of the design risks. It’s not generic. But it’s also very effective as a design font. It really does let you appreciate the text and focus on your own content.”

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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