Ask any designer, and they will say, choosing the right font for a brand can be similar to selecting a life partner, sometimes even tougher! Why is selecting the right font so important? The right typography will not just leave your users in awe but also flow with their eye movements, make them click, and increase your website’s conversion rate.
With 1000+ Google fonts available, selecting the best font families for the website was tough. But the selection criteria was based on Readability, Usability, and Purpose. Read until the end of the blog to understand why or why not to use Google fonts.
I have purposefully avoided single-weight fonts as they have limited usefulness in real-world projects, especially websites. Here’s the list of 10 Free Google Fonts for your next project.
1. Mulish (earlier known as Muli)*
Mulish is a versatile and minimalist sans-serif font that was designed by the late Vernon Adams. It was originally designed to be used as a display font, but later, other designers collaborated to add more weights to the font family to make it perfect for both web and mobile interfaces.
*Mulish font was earlier known as Muli and the name was changed in the year 2020.
2. Nunito Sans
Nunito Sans is a modern and well-balanced sans-serif font available in the full set of weights. It is recommended to use Nunito Sans when you want a modern and clean look. There are 8 different weights available, and it is another brilliant creation by Late Vernon Adams.
It has another font family called “Nunito,” which comes with a unique rounded character design.
3. Rubik
Rubik’s rounded corners give it a pleasant and friendly feel. Rubik is a sans serif font designed by Philipp Hubert and Sebastian Fischer.
Rubik has stylish rounded edges, making it an ideal font for titles and headings on your website. It’s available in 5 weights.
4. Source Sans Pro
Source Sans Pro is Adobe’s first open-source typeface family. It works excellent for longer texts, thanks to its width, which is slightly higher than usual. In terms of design, this font is just perfect and was created to be used for user interfaces. It is highly readable, which makes it an excellent choice for both web and mobile.
Download Source Sans Pro
5. Poppins
Poppins was created by the Indian Type Foundry. It is an attractive, geometric sans-serif font for use in text or display contexts. It’s also the first font on our list to support the Devanagari system used in over 150 languages, including Hindi and Sanskrit. Poppins is available in nine weights. The accurate geometric design of its characters makes it suitable for both headings and body text.
6. Fira Sans
Fira Sans was designed to integrate with the character of the Mozilla FirefoxOS. This typeface was created to make the font’s readability and legibility support a wide range of devices. It is available in nine weights with matching italics. The regular and medium font weights are great for body text, while the heavier and lighter weights are optimized for display purposes.
7. Sarabun
Sarabun is an open-source multi-script webfont.
8. Quicksand
Quicksand is a sans serif font with rounded terminals. The font was created by Andrew Paglinawan using geometric shapes as a core foundation. It is designed for display purposes but it is legible enough to use in small sizes as well. This is ideal for headings and short titles.
9. Ubuntu
Ubuntu is the default font used in the popular Linux-based operating system of the same name. This font is an excellent choice for titles and headings. The only downside is, it may not be the right choice for body text.
10. Oxygen
Oxygen is a beautiful font, and because of its simplicity, it can be used for both web and mobile. The letters are longer than usual gives a professional and sleek look to the websites.
The only downside is that this font doesn’t include italic typefaces. So it is an ideal option for titles and headings.
What are the advantages of using Google fonts?
1. You have access to more than 1000 free Sans Serif, Serif, and Script fonts. That’s a lot to choose from!
2. Google Fonts are free for commercial use, so there is no trouble with licensing.
3. The fonts are easy to implement on your website, so font embedding is a breeze.
4. Accessibility is the key and designers keep updating and adding new font weights from time to time.
5. Google Fonts makes web pages run faster by safely caching fonts without compromising users’ privacy or security.
Disadvantages of using Google fonts:
1. If you are looking for a unique typeface, Google fonts may not be the ideal option since many brands use them.
2. The quality of typefaces isn’t always equally excellent (although most of the fonts perform very well, and some even outperform paid typefaces).
3. Google fonts have a vast collection, so selecting or pairing the right font can be overwhelming.
Additionally:
Choosing the right font is more than just an aesthetic option – it can affect your site’s bounce rate, especially if you select a tough font for your visitors to read.
Google’s free font library has 1000+ fonts, so you have the freedom to choose between a wide range of professional-quality typefaces.
Accessibility is also a great benefit of Google fonts, and they provide better legibility and readability. In addition, the open-source nature of Google fonts makes them optimal for commercial and personal use. However, I recommend reading the license before using it free for commercial use.
Google fonts are like WordPress plugins and themes because there are constant updates and improvements over time to make them even better.
Google fonts webpage has filters where you can filter by font family, type, style, widths, etc., without scrolling past all the options. You can also type a sentence and compare how your content will look in different fonts and download the best font.
Here’s a little bonus:
More fonts like Open Sans, Lato, Montserrat, Raleway, Roboto, Oswald, etc. are good options from Google Fonts library which I have purposefully not included since they are already quite popular and used by many brands. If you have not used them already, you can give them a try as well.
Google Fonts are used by millions of websites every day. Following best practices such as limiting font weights, and maintaining visual hierarchy is key to making a user-friendly experience.
I have listed down only Sans Serif fonts in this blog, and the next blog is coming soon for Best Serif and Script fonts from Google fonts library.
What are your favorite Google Fonts? Let us know.
Reference: https://fonts.google.com/
