Introduction

Typography is a craft that, being charged with artistic, aesthetic and technical values, deserves more attention than the general public usually gives it. We are so used to seeing text everywhere we hardly ever stop to actually look at those letters, the way they are crafted and arranged within their environment, and, what’s particularly important, how they fit and interact with the graphic context they’re placed in.

At CodeStitch, we believe typography should be approached with equal focus and care as any other design element. It’s not just that the fonts “carry” the text, they also imbue the design with particular psychological values and convey specific messages, just like images and colors do. Certain typefaces communicate energy and optimism, while others give the design an elegant or sophisticated feel. Some are romantic, and of course, many can be quite rigid yet professional. The right choice of typeface ensures the consistency of a design and is also extremely important in terms of branding and creating an aesthetic personality.

Why Google Fonts?

While there are so many amazing type foundries out there creating all sorts of innovative and classic typefaces, designers often opt for free fonts that can be downloaded from the web, available in all the required varieties for web use. There are tons of places these days where anyone can download a font. At CodeStitch, our team’s favorite open-source font marketplace is Google Fonts.

There are a lot of reasons why Google Fonts reigns supreme over other free font sources. For one, it’s Google, and you know they take things extremely seriously. With Google Fonts, a designer can be sure the technicalities such as licensing are taken care of, and they are also very easy to add to any website thanks to the Google Fonts API. In addition, Google Fonts represent a curated collection of typefaces that have been audited, tried, and tested before being put up for download. We’re talking about high-quality fonts designed to work great on all sorts of screens, from big to small. The only trouble is that there are so, so many of them to choose from. In fact, there are more than 1,200 font families available for free from this font repository (and the number keeps growing as Google is adding new fonts on a regular basis), so finding your way around them can be a tough chore.

Because we’ve dealt with the headache first-hand, and even more so because we’re really into strong typographic application, we’ve decided to share a selection of what we believe are the most exciting and flexible Google Font Pairs out there right now:

Also, to learn how to host your fonts locally so you don't need to use the Google Fonts CDN link, see our guide here.

Roboto & Nunito

This is a headline that is in Roboto to contrast with the nunito text

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Roboto has a dual nature. It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. At the same time, the font features friendly and open curves. While some grotesks distort their letterforms to force a rigid rhythm, Roboto doesn’t compromise, allowing letters to be settled into their natural width. This makes for a more natural reading rhythm more commonly found in humanist and serif types.

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Nunito is a well balanced sans serif typeface superfamily, with 2 versions: The project began with Nunito, created by Vernon Adams as a rounded terminal sans serif for display typography. Jacques Le Bailly extended it to a full set of weights, and an accompanying regular non-rounded terminal version, Nunito Sans.

Syne & Inter

This is a headline that is in Syne to contrast with the Inter text

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The Syne family was originally designed in 2017 for the Art Center "Synesthésie", based in Saint-Denis — a suburb of Paris. The Art Center aims to gather diverse artistic personalities in order to create new and enriching situations. Based on that idea, Syne is an exploration of atypical associations of weights and styles.

Syne Regular is the starting point of the family. It is quite an archetypal geometric sans-serif, giving the art center a practical asset for their daily use, When getting bolder, the typeface also gets wider, forcing radical graphic design choices.

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Inter is a variable font family carefully crafted & designed for computer screens.

Inter features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate “O” from “o”, tabular numbers, etc.

Montserrat & Lato

This is a headline that is in Montserrat to contrast with the Lato text

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The Montserrat typeface began with the idea to rescue what is in Montserrat and set it free under a libre license, the SIL Open Font License.

This is the normal family, and it has two sister families so far, Alternates and Subrayada. Many of the letterforms are special in the Alternates family, while ‘Subrayada’ means ‘Underlined’ in Spanish and celebrates a special style of underline that is integrated into the letterforms found in the Montserrat neighborhood.

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Lato is a sans serif typeface family started in the summer of 2010 by Warsaw-based designer Łukasz Dziedzic (“Lato” means “Summer” in Polish).

When working on Lato, Łukasz tried to carefully balance some potentially conflicting priorities. He wanted to create a typeface that would seem quite “transparent” when used in body text but would display some original traits when used in larger sizes. He used classical proportions (particularly visible in the uppercase) to give the letterforms familiar harmony and elegance. At the same time, he created a sleek sans serif look, which makes evident the fact that Lato was designed in 2010 — even though it does not follow any current trend.

Noto Serif Lao & Noto Sans

This is a headline that is in Noto Serif to contrast with the Noto Sans text

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Noto is a global font collection for writing in all modern and ancient languages. Noto Serif is a modulated (“serif”) design for texts in the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts, also suitable as the complementary font for other script-specific Noto Serif fonts. It has italic styles, multiple weights and widths, and 3,256 glyphs.

Noto Serif Lao is a modulated (“serif”) design for texts in the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts, also suitable as the complementary font for other script-specific Noto Serif fonts.

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Noto Sans is an unmodulated (“sans serif”) design for texts in the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts, which is also suitable as the complementary choice for other script-specific Noto Sans fonts.

Playfair Display & DM Sans

This is a headline that is in Playfair Display to contrast with the DM Sans text

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Playfair Display is a transitional design. In the European Enlightenment in the late 18th century, broad nib quills were replaced by pointed steel pens as the popular writing tool of the day. Together with developments in printing technology, ink, and paper making, it became to print letterforms of high contrast and delicate hairlines that were increasingly detached from the written letterforms.

This design lends itself to this period, and while it is not a revival of any particular design, it takes influence from the designs of John Baskerville and from ‘Scotch Roman’ designs. Being a Display (large size) design in the transitional genre, functionally and stylistically it can accompany Georgia for body text.

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DM Sans is a low-contrast geometric sans serif design, intended for use at smaller text sizes.

DM Sans supports a Latin Extended glyph set, enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages. It was designed by Colophon Foundry (UK), that started from the Latin portion of ITF Poppins, by Jonny Pinhorn.

Oswald & Source Serif Pro

This is a headline that is in Oswald to contrast with the Serif Pro text

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Oswald is a reworking of the classic style historically represented by the 'Alternate Gothic' sans serif typefaces. The characters of Oswald were initially re-drawn and reformed to better fit the pixel grid of standard digital screens. Oswald is designed to be used freely across the internet by web browsers on desktop computers, laptops and mobile devices.

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Source Serif Pro is a serif typeface in the transitional style, designed to complement most sans serif typefaces. The close companionship of Serif and Sans is achieved by a careful match of letter proportions and typographic color. Source Serif is loosely based on the work of Pierre Simon Fournier, and many idiosyncrasies typical to Fournier’s designs (like the bottom serif on the b or the middle serif on the w) are also found in Source Serif. Without being a pure historical revival, Source Serif takes cues from Fournier and reworks them for a modern age.

Stint Ultra Expanded & Pontano Sans

This is a headline that is in Stint Ultra to contrast with the Pontano Sans text

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Stint Ultra Expanded is an ultra expanded square serif typestyle developed based on the letterforms of the Syncopate Family. Syncopate boasts extra wide unicase forms, and Stint Ultra Expanded follows this direction, featuring wide letterforms of both the capital and lowercase varieties. This is the opposite of the Stint Ultra Condensed typestyle.

Highly legible and matching the Syncopate family width, Stint Ultra Expanded is a perfect font for powerful headlines and copy when realty on websites and designs is less of a concern.

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Pontano Sans Pontano Sans is a minimalist and light weighted Sans Serif. Pontano is designed mainly for use as a display font but is useable as a text font too. Pontano Sans has been designed to be used freely across the internet by web browsers on desktop computers, laptops and mobile devices.

Space Grotesk & Inconsolata

This is a headline that is in Space Grotesk to contrast with the Inconsolata text

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Space Grotesk Space Grotesk is a proportional sans-serif typeface variant based on Colophon Foundry's fixed-width Space Mono family (2016). Originally designed by Florian Karsten in 2018, Space Grotesk retains the monospace's idiosyncratic details while optimizing for improved readability at non-display sizes.

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Inconsolata was Raph Levien's first serious original font release. It is a monospace font, designed for printed code listings and the like. There are a great many “programmer fonts,” designed primarily for use on the screen, but in most cases do not have the attention to detail for high resolution rendering.

Inconsolata draws from many inspirations and sources. I was particularly struck by the beauty of Luc(as) de Groot's Consolas, which is his monospaced design for Microsoft's Vista release. This font, similar to his earlier TheSansMono, demonstrated clearly to me that monospaced fonts do not have to suck.

Caudex & Merriweather

This is a headline that is in Caudex to contrast with the Merriweather text

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Caudex was originally made in the late 90s for printing some old handwritten text. It includes most of the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) version 3.0 recommendations.

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Merriweather was designed to be a text face that is pleasant to read on screens. It features a very large x height, slightly condensed letterforms, a mild diagonal stress, sturdy serifs and open forms.

There is also Merriweather Sans, a sans-serif version which closely harmonizes with the weights and styles of this serif family.

Poppins & Lora

This is a headline that is in Poppins to contrast with the Lora text

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Poppins is one of the newcomers to the long tradition of popular geometric sans serif typefaces. With support for the Devanagari and Latin writing systems, it is an internationalist take on the genre.

Many of the Latin glyphs (such as the ampersand) are more constructed and rationalist than is typical. The Devanagari design is particularly new, and is the first ever Devanagari typeface with a range of weights in this genre. Just like the Latin, the Devanagari is based on pure geometry, particularly circles.

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Lora is a well-balanced contemporary serif with roots in calligraphy. It is a text typeface with moderate contrast well suited for body text.

A paragraph set in Lora will make a memorable appearance because of its brushed curves in contrast with driving serifs. The overall typographic voice of Lora perfectly conveys the mood of a modern-day story, or an art essay.

Final Words of Wisdom

This is by no means an exhaustive list of our favorite Google fonts right now. In fact, our designers had a hard time narrowing down their choice, since there are so many incredibly well-crafted typefaces and font families in the Google repository, each bearing their own distinctive character and practical implications. The choice of the font for a design, as always, depends on a multitude of factors — its purpose, intended use and aesthetic character being just some of the most important ones. When picking a font, it’s also important to be able to see it in action, which is where resources like Fonts in Use can be of help, especially for more idiosyncratic types.

We hope that our list inspired you to take a deeper dive into the Google Fonts repository. A wealth of wonderful, functional, superbly designed fonts await you and your next project. Make sure you give us a shout with your typographic discovery and let us know what your own favorites are.