Google Fonts has become one of the leading choices for embedding custom fonts on websites. With more 600 fonts to choose from, it can be a daunting task browsing through a directory of that size and trying to filter out only the best.
In search of the right typefaces for our own projects, we came across some stunning web fonts and wanted to share them with you.
Arvo
Arvo is a slab serif typeface that’s best suited for screen and print. The font family includes 4 styles, including Roman, Italic, Roman Bold, and Bold Italic.
Bree Serif
Bree Serif, a sister font to Bree (sans serif) font, became an instant hit for its versatility. With a polished modern look, it works very well with branding and headlines in print and screen mediums.
Cabin
Inspired by Edward Johnston’s and Eric Gill’s typefaces, Cabin has been described as humanist sans typeface that incorporates a touch a modernism, while maintaining its roots. Cabin is an Impallari Type font that comes in 4 weights and 8 style families.
Droid Sans
Droid Sans is another humanist sans serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corp. Since its release in 2007, Droid Sans blew up in popularity very quickly became one of the most sought after fonts for web and mobile designs.
Droid Serif
Droid Serif was a perfect companion for Droid Sans typeface. It was ideal for displaying strong, bold headlines, while Droid Sans drew the readers in with its gentle, friendly appearance in body text.
Josefin Slab
Josefin Slab is a clean typeface with typewriter style attributes. The font family includes 10 styles.
Lato
“Lato,” meaning “Summer” in Polish, is a sans-serif typeface designed by Łukasz Dziedzic. The semi-rounded letters give Lato a strong yet friendly tone, allowing for flexibility of use in either body text or headlines.
Lobster
Lobster is another beautifully designed typeface by Impallari. It is a bold script typeface with numerous hand-lettered ligature options.
Lobster Two
With a massive success found through the original Lobster typeface, Impallari decided to release a second (improved) version called Lobster Two, which unlike the original Lobster comes with 4 style families.
Lora
Lora is a well-balanced contemporary serif typeface with moderate contrast that’s well suited for body text.
Open Sans
A humanist sans serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corp. Since its release in 2010, Open Sans quickly became the preferred typeface by many designers, as it was a fantastic substitute for (sometimes loathed) Helvetica.
Oswald
Oswald is one of the earliest typefaces to be published on Google Web Fonts, and due to its narrow style, it quickly gained traction as the preferred typeface for long headlines or titles. Those with keen eyes would have noticed that Oswald bares much resemblance to Bebas Neue in many ways.
Pacifico
Pacifico is a fun handwriting typeface designed by Vernon Adams. The design concept for Pacifico was inspired by the 1950’s American surf culture.
Patua One
Patua One is a slab serif typeface that’s designed to be used in small sizes. The smooth yet strong serif curves makes a profound visual impact while maintaining readability.
Poly
Poly is a medium contrast serif font with a very high x-height, as it was originally designed to increase legibility in serif fonts even in small sizes. It also makes a great alternative to Lora.
PT Sans
The original design concept for PT Sans was based on Russian sans serif typefaces. The primary goal for the development of this font was to allow the people of Russia to write and read on their native language.
Source Sans Pro
Source Sans Pro is Adobe’s very first open source typeface. It is a sans serif typeface that was designed to enhance the readability in user interface designs and quickly becoming a designer favorite.
Varela Round
For those looking for a substitute for Proxima Nova might want to check out Varela Round, as it makes for an excellent substitution. And because of its soft rounded edges, it functions well in small and large sizes.
Vollkorn
Vollkorn was designed with intentions of being quiet yet modest, with text that can be used broadly across various screen and print mediums. Best use of this font is for titles and headlines.
Have you come across a great typefaces that we missed on our Top Google Fonts list? Let us know by getting in touch with us.
Nice set of fonts. We are using Open Sans for a while, and are very satisfied.
Lato, Poly, PT Sans got our attention through your blog. Thanks!
Glad you found it useful!
Just a warning about Pacifico webfont: it crashes IE8 if you use any acute accent characters: https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/issues/detail?id=209
Didn’t know that…Thanks for the heads up Marco! But in this day and age, people do need to start upgrading and going beyond IE 8