Top 10 Google Fonts for 2014
Johnny Lee
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Google Fonts, formerly known as Google Web Fonts, was first launched in 2010. It is a free directory of all sorts of fonts– both popular and not. This is a great avenue for designers, programmers and more if they’re looking for great fonts.
To date, there are thousands of fonts available at your disposal. We are here to help you by narrowing the list down to 10 great fonts you could use for your next project. Take a look at Google Fonts’ best:
Playfair Display
Playfair Display is an elegantly-styled serif font created by Claus Eggers Sorensen. As its name would suggest, it is more of a display font and should therefore only be used at larger sizes.
Roboto
You would like Roboto because it is a wonderfully usable font. There are a total of 12 available weights and styles in this family. Ranging from the elegance of the “thin” weight to the hearty characteristics of the “ultra-bold” one, this font can be used for both body and headlines.
Lato
With over 2,500 glyphs and support for over 100 languages, Lato is one of the most usable fonts in the Google Fonts library. Being beautiful on its own , this font can be used for both body text and headers. Designer of this typeface Lukassz Dziezic says that 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”.
Raleway
Another great font brought to you by the guys at The League of Movable Type is Raleway. According to them, Raleway “is a display face that features both old style and lining numerals, standard and discretionary ligatures, a pretty complete set of diacritics, as well as a stylistic alternate inspired by more geometric sans-serif typefaces than it’s neo-grotesque inspired default character set”. Even though it doesn’t have italics or a full set of glyphs, it comes with enough weights to look great on a screen.
Arimo
You are most probably familiar with the standard Arial that has been with most operating systems through years and years. You can consider Arimo as its updated and better-looking sibling. Steve Matteson, designer of Arimo, says that is it a “refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Arial.” This is another font that lacks an abundance of font weights, but it does offer enough to be used as a body font. However, Arimo really shines when used as a display / heading font”.
Cabin
Inspired by Edward Johnston;s and Eric Gill’s typefaces, the Cabin font family is a humanist sans that comes in 4 weights and true italics. It incorporates optical adjustments, modern proportions and some elements of geometric sans.
Vollkorn
Vollkorn is the first attempt to designing of author Friedrich Althausen. According to him, Vollkorn “intends to be a quiet, modest and well working text face for bread and butter use”. it comes with dark and chunky serifs that give it its bouncing and healthy look.
Arvo
Arvo is a geometric slab-serif font family that looks great both in print and on screen. Included in the family are 4 cuts: Italic, Roman, Roman Bold, and Bold Italic. Arvo is an open font that is distributed through the Google Font Directory.
Bree Serif
This upright italic is the serif version of TypeTogether’s Bree, an award-winning font. Designed by Veronika Burian and Jose Scaglione, Bree became an immediate success because of the originality it carries when it was first released in 2008. Now, the serif style that Bree Serif incorporates adds some extra flavor to this already tasty font.
Droid Sans
Type Director of Ascender Corp. Steve Matteson designed this humanist sans serif typeface. Droid Sans was created with upright stress and friendly appearance in mind. It is also optimized for user interfaces so that readers will be comfortable reading even on a mobile handset.
Weren’t all of those choices extremely great? There’s a reason that they made it to this list and we hope that you see that reason, too. Try one of these fonts on for size and see the wonders that they could do for your project!
