Bold headings and colorful text are often the first things people notice on a company’s website.
Attractive fonts invite users to scroll down and view the products and services — but the wrong fonts can sometimes drive them away.
Companies need to find a balance between accessible, easy-to-read fonts and unique lettering that emphasizes their brand. Building a cohesive brand isn’t always easy, but staying loyal to a font streamlines the reading experience on any website.
Is the website you created ready to launch?
It may seem like a minor detail, but choosing the right font for the brand you’re working with is crucial. Think about your target audience and the message you want to convey to your website’s visitors.
Whether serif or sans serif, your website’s font is key to user experience. (If you don’t know what serif fonts are, we recommend skimming through our introduction to web typography.)
But where can you find the best fonts for your website? This guide will look at Google Fonts, one of the best online resources for fonts to elevate your website to its full potential.
What is Google Fonts?
Google Fonts is an open-source library that houses hundreds of fonts that allows you to browse font families and test different typefaces in over 135 languages. You can download all these font files for free.
Google Fonts will even tell you a little about each font, such as its designer, related work, and data on the font's trends and usage. Additionally, Google sorts its fonts according to your area's popularity, consumer patterns, and trends.
This library allows you to filter fonts according to their families and weights. You can also test color combinations with samples to create personalized font collections. You can even streamline your design process by sharing these collections with other team members.
Some of Google Fonts’ best features include that the fonts are:
- Free: Google offers open-source fonts, which means they’re free to use. You can distribute and modify them according to your needs.
- Ready for commercial use: Google Fonts are available for commercial use, so you can use them for marketing purposes or on any of your products.
- Compatible with websites and Android OS: You can use Google Fonts if you’re developing an Android app, as long as you have Android Jelly Bean or a later version. Google also allows you to embed Google Fonts directly into your website, helping your branding stay consistent across platforms.
- Good for branding: You can easily use Google Fonts on printed products, e-books, storefronts, jewelry, educational materials, and other surfaces.
- Modifiable: You can alter a Google Font with any design software and use it commercially. You can change a font’s spacing, thickness, or slope.
The good news is that you don’t have to browse through hundreds of fonts and test different combinations to find the perfect font for your website. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best Google Fonts you can use for your website today.
Top 10 Google Fonts
Google Fonts has updated its font library many times in recent years. Let's look at some of the most popular Google fonts:
1. Open Sans
Open Sans is one of the design industry’s most popular fonts. Designed by Steve Matteson, Open Sans is a minimal, sans serif font best suited to paragraphs and smaller text. It’s available in 13 styles, ranging from light to extrabold.
2. Alegreya
Alegreya is a beautifully elegant font designed by Juan Pablo del Peral. It was created with print in mind, and its quill-like appearance translates to the screen nicely, especially for more sophisticated designs that require a classic touch. Alegreya comes in 16 different styles and font weights. There’s also a sans version available.
3. Roboto
Roboto is a web-safe font used by Google for its Android devices and for Google services. It was initially created by Google designer Christian Robertson as a replacement for Android’s previous Droid font. Roboto’s clean appearance makes it a popular choice among graphic designers. If you have a OnePlus device, you’re probably reading this in Roboto.
4. Anek
Anek is a sans serif typeface that offers fonts in Latin and nine Indian languages: Bangla, Devanagari, Kannada, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu. It uses different fonts, styles, and weights to support each language. If you’re looking for an Indian-based font, Anek has you covered.
5. Montserrat
Montserrat is another well-known contemporary font. Created by renowned graphic designer Julieta Ulanovsky, Montserrat is now a staple among designers because of its versatility and wide range of weights — it’s great for just about anything. It comes in 36 different styles, from thin to black, and corresponding italics.
6. Lato
Lato is a distinctive sans serif font designed by Adam Twardoch, Botio Nikoltchev, and Łukasz Dziedzic. Lato means “summer” in Polish and is one of Google Fonts’ most-used typefaces for body text. It’s a clean and professional font that comes in 18 different weights.
7. Poppins
Poppins is a newer font that instantly became a designer favorite due to its sleek appearance and minimal aesthetic. It’s an excellent font for bold headlines and titles and looks great with a contrasting background. Poppins is a geometric font designed by Jonny Pinhorn and Ninad Kale and is available in 18 styles, from thin to black.
8. Oswald
Oswald is a sans serif font designed by Vernon Adams. It comes in seven different weights: extra light, light, regular, medium, semibold, bold, and heavy regular. We recommend using Oswald for headings — its bold appearance stands out and combines well with thinner fonts.
9. Raleway
Like Oswald, Raleway’s thicker weights make it stand out when used for titles and headings. It was designed by Matt McInerney, Pablo Impallari, and Rodrigo Fuenzalida and is a sans serif typeface that is particularly popular among designers today due to its versatility. It pairs well with both modern and classic fonts.
10. Futura
Futura is among the most widely used fonts in graphic design. Nike, Domino’s Pizza, and Volkswagen have all used Futura in some capacity, proving it's a versatile font that works for various products and services. Futura was created by Isabella Chaeva, Paul Renner, Vladimir Andrich, and Vladimir Yefimov and is available in 22 weights.
Now that we’ve reviewed some top Google fonts, let’s explore how to pair them.
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Font combinations
Using a single font for your entire website can sometimes become monotonous (although there are exceptions to this idea). When using two fonts, keep one for the headings and the other for the body. Bonus points if they slightly resemble each other.
If you’re interested in mixing and matching, check out our article on pairing fonts to learn how to guide the eye with greater control. Here are our favorite font combinations using the most popular Google Fonts for your website.
1. Montserrat and Barlow Condensed
Montserrat is one of the design industry’s most-loved fonts. It’s a minimal typeface that allows enough breathing space to make reading comfortable on any webpage. Use Montserrat in your main text and pair it with Barlow Condensed, whose letters are spaced closer together.
2. Alegreya Regular and Bold
Using a single font doesn’t have to be boring. Use different styles to make the most of it. Alegreya is an elegant font and comes in 16 different styles, but we like to pair its Regular weight with Alegreya Bold.
3. Roboto and Roboto Condensed
No Google Fonts list is complete without Roboto. It’s the mainstay of Google web text, and these two weights from the same font family complement each other very well.
4. Oswald and Source Serif Pro
Oswald and Source Serif Pro is a classic example of pairing a sans serif font with a serif one. Oswald stands out with its thicker weight, while Source Serif Pro allows for comfortable reading. Source Sans Pro is also a great option if you want a sans font.
Ready to give it a go?
If you’re looking for the best fonts for your website, Google Fonts is undoubtedly one of your best resources. Plus, it’s easy to add Google fonts to your Webflow site.
If you need help navigating fonts in Webflow, check out our guide on typography, which covers headlines, paragraphs, fonts, and more.
Published
October 13, 2022
Category
Resources
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