“what are people's favorite fonts from google fonts?”
Summary of results
Every once in a while when I get bored, I head over to Google Fonts page and download some fonts: https://fonts.google.com/?category=Monospace&subset=latin
I was thinking about changing my personal website's font to a monospaced one.
Anybody know which ones are particularly good for long-form text readability?
Bonus points if it's on Google Fonts.
Favorite general use fonts for ux design as of 2022 are:
+ Readex Pro
+ Be Vietnam Pro
Favorite if you need many or all languages:
+ IBM Plex
+ Noto Sans (of Google Android fame)
But yeah, IBM Plex is very well done. These are all available on Google Fonts, and specifically designed for readability.
RobotoMono [1] is my favorite, Iosevka [2] is also good choice but it isn't on Google Fonts yet [3]. If you still want to use it, the web fonts are hosted in Github pages [4]
[1] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Mono
[2] https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
I'm partial to Drafting Mono - https://indestructibletype.com/Drafting/ - for paragraph display.
Not on Google Fonts but it's free (or very cheap for the variable version).
Can we get this in Google fonts finally? any googlers here?
Here's Google's 1st hit for "Google Fonts privacy", you can find more: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2020/08/google-fonts-privacy...
One such set of packages I've used is Fontsource. Has all the Google fonts plusany more.
Instead of having to download and serve a separate font for each style (bold, light, etc.) it's just one font that interpolates those attributes resulting in much smaller font sizes. Here's a list from google fonts just to see some examples... https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true
They’re pretty easy to serve from local: https://github.com/radekg/google-font-download. Most of individual fonts available in google fonts are SIL OFL 1.1:
> The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is one of the major open font licenses, which allows embedding, or "bundling", of the font in commercially sold products. OFL is a free and open source license.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_Open_Font_License#:~:tex....
Unfortunate compromise of not paying for font licenses — and google fonts is the most extensive collection of free fonts.
As for fonts — it’s unideal! Those initial fonts are actually just the glyphs subset of fonts so I can display their names in the font picker. It’s already somewhat cut down by separating the fonts into basic and all, as well as delaying the load a few seconds after initial load, but still a lot to fix up there.
Here's a great little helper to self-host google fonts: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts
Caveat: Google Fonts, and by extension Fontsource which mostly just mirrors Googles files, strips out most of the advanced OpenType features to reduce filesize. It's worth checking the upstream version of your font to see which features it actually offers.
e.g. Wakamai Fondue lists 11 features for Googles version of Inter, while the full fat version of Inter has 44.
It's hard to distinguish non-Google projects with Google Sans in their templates from actual Google Research papers, as the font is meant to be exclusively used by Google[1].
[1] https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#how_can_i_get_a_lice...
The Google Fonts API serves different formats based on user agent. Woff2 is still the best, until Incremental Font Transfer arrives
For several years (probably 10!) Calibri was my preferred font. I wouldn't read a Google Doc without converting it.
An unexpected shift occurred this year, and for the last 2 months, I've defaulted to serif fonts, with Spectral being the favourite, and TNR coming in second.
A nice example, not currently available on Google fonts AFAICT, is 'Gilbert': https://www.typewithpride.com
One part of "not boring" is picking one that fits your taste and the style of the site you are using it on. So there cannot be one canonical recommendation.
Google fonts is full of usable stuff. Just have the courage to pick something that isn't mainstream yawn-inducing boredom. The other points are almost automatically satisified. For GDPR reasons, copy the font file to your webserver (caching won't work anyways in modern browsers).
But if you really really want something safe, easy, no-thinking-required that works for almost everything, on most devices, is readable on screens, looks modern but sufficiently boring and inoffensive, has big unicode coverage: use Roboto.
Ah yes, "typographic creativity" - going to Google Fonts dot com and choosing Roboto.
Why don't you download and self-host the Google fonts?
Right?! Unbounded and Darker Grotesque, both are open source from Google fonts(fonts.google.com). My co-founder picked it because he said the negative space in the C looked like the spoons he uses every morning to eat his cereal ha.
Tangentially related -- I just want bloggers to think twice before choosing (mis|ab)used Google Fonts just because they look "fancier" at first sight. Lato and Merriweather have become Arial and Times New Roman of our time.
I have too many fonts... what's your favorite font navigator?
as a big fan of self-hosting all the things, without CDNs (except vids or hi res galleries), i've been a regular user of google-webfonts-helper:
This website depends on Google Fonts.
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Serif+Pro" rel="stylesheet">
..."almost inevitably from Google Analyt... err, Fonts"
I prefer localGfonts, "Online tool to provide fonts and css snippets for self-hosting using google fonts"
Seeing as everybody's using this space to plug their favourite font, and the one I use hasn't been mentioned yet: I'm partial to Generic Mono II (http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-75172.html & https://github.com/organicplanning/hackedfonts). It has slashed zeroes and, with a reduced character spacing, just looks nice and otherwise doesn't distract from what I'm doing. Though it's coverage outside of the Latin character set leaves a bit more to be desired.
The fonts used here are nice. What are they?
On the Google Font side, is there a leading tool/project that lets you pick from the Google font list (and maybe more?) and quickly set up local hosting with roughly the same amount of hassle?
What's your favorite programming font?
If you're worried about GDPR or your users' privacy when using Google Fonts, someone wrote privacy-friendly drop-in replacement at https://github.com/coollabsio/fonts
Also here, if one would like to avoid Google somewhat https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/atkinson-hyperlegible
This is a long-running a shortcoming of Google Fonts, and as much as this is a welcome UI upgrade, it unfortunately does nothing to address the paltry set of tags that have passed for a taxonomy since Google Fonts’ inception.
It’s a particular shame given what a truly rich typographic library Google Fonts has grown to be: transitional and oldstyle serifs, didones, humanist sans, geometric sans, grotesks, even frakturs… all of this is flattened into an MS Word-caliber set of classifications that still calls script display types “handwriting” fonts.
Out of all the other sans typefaces on Google Fonts, Inter is arguably the cleanest looking followed closely by Archivo. I'll take Inter over any of the "fancier" fonts any day.
I don't know why people use fonts served from Google on their websites. Just serve the fonts from the server the site is on. It's like having javascript libraries served by 3rd parties; it's less robust.
Which fonts do support them?
all google fonts are OFL (the copyleft SIL open font license[0]) with the exception of some legacy fonts which are apache 2. they don’t publish fonts that aren’t OFL anymore
0. http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...
there's a very handy tool, called google webfonts helper, which that can download and include google fonts for you
It always amazes me Google doesn't simply ship say the top 50 most popular fonts in Chrome that Google are already providing via Google Fonts anyway. Think of all that wasted energy and bandwidth!
Every time I suggest this the idea is laughed at and the hand wavy replies say that it can't be done.
I really like the ADF fonts. My go-to are Gillius ADF, Tribun ADF Std. I also often use Bergamo and Arimo. Before this I used kpfonts.
You can self-host Google Fonts.
The font this is based is based on Nunito, by Vernon Adams (as the article states). He's responsible for many google fonts and other open source fonts which rack up billions of views every year. I just wanted to share his story:
https://chrisgliddon.com/the-tragic-story-of-vernon-and-oswa...
I came across this and was surprised to find Bunny Fonts lets you use many more fonts than just Google fonts for the web.
Is there anyone using this or something similar?
No, it's not free. Fonts are incredibly labor intensive and require both artistic and technical skill. $75 for a family of well designed fonts pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for paid fonts. Check out the pricing for a single variant of something like Helvetica or FF Meta some time. A single family may very well be someone's entire life's work. Same reason that you get paid to bang on a keyboard while open source exists.
That said I've not bought Berkeley Mono, and probably won't (mostly because the style isn't quite to my current taste). I've bought fonts in the past, typically drawing the piracy line when I make money from a font (e.g. letterhead, business cards). Over the past two decades the list includes: Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic (great at small sizes), FF Meta and FF Zwo (for copy), and FF Mister K (uses ligatures to create a more organic looking handwriting font).
Much like with other software there are great free alternatives that pop up every once in a while on HN when the topic of coding fonts comes up. Fira Code (by Erik Spiekermann of FF fame), Plex (IBM), Source Code (Adobe), Cascadia (Microsoft), and JetBrains Mono (duh). Notice that they're all backed by large orgs — again, fonts are a ton of work. Contrast that with something like B612 (Airbus) which is cool but also basically abandonware and lacks the fit and finish of the previous fonts.
If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs[0]. But again these lack the polish you may be used to as they're way out of their element on modern systems.
Me? I'm currently using M+ Code 60[1] (Coji Morishita backed by Google) as a daily driver[2]. I'm enamored with its slightly quirky style (just enough to keep me interested) and its legibility as a console font.
0: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
You can DM @googlefonts or email [email protected], as explained in the GF FAQ
https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#how_do_i_contact_goo...
The site claims to be using https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond but something has gone wrong with the italics (at least on my screen), they are just an oblique version of the roman version of the font, whereas the Google Fonts page has a much nicer actually italic version (e.g. compare the lowercase h on the Google Fonts page above vs the linked page).
This is one purpose of Google fonts, but it's not the only purpose.
Google has nearly 100% search market share, so one of the only ways that they can increase search traffic at this point is by increasing web traffic in general. One of the ways they do this is by making it easier to create web content by e.g. distributing fonts.
See Gwern Branwen's excellent article on the subject: https://gwern.net/complement
Aside, but please consider using https://fontsource.org/ instead of Google Fonts: just as easy to use, and no tracking (at least from Google).
For web it'll really vary by font family availability and fallback. Personally I like the nerd don't variant for Inconsolata, Cascadia Coffee and Firs Code for fixed width usage.
I wish self packaging similar to how Google Fonts does it was easier to do. IE breaking up the don't into glyph segments to reduce unused characters for languages not used.
This is a fantastic font that has become my go-to for web projects. It's variable width, so one file gives you all the bold, semi, thin, black variations, etc.
Also lots of cool glyphs, old style numerals, ligatures, etc and it's specifically designed for web readability. And free and open source!