Are Google fonts free to use?

Yes, all the fonts in the catalogue are open source, which means they're available for anyone to use freely for any kind of project. You can use them for both personal and commercial work, you can share them and you can even modify the fonts. Google Fonts takes care of the licensing and hosting.

How do I use Google fonts in a website?

Simply open Google Fonts , Find the font and click it and then, click "+ Select this style". On the right side, click "Selected family", click "Embed" and choose <link> or @import depending on where you need to add the font (HTML or CSS).

The best Google Fonts

(Image credit: Google)

The best Google Fonts are hugely useful resource for designers. The are lots of them, covering all kinds of styles, they're free to download, and you can use them in both personal and commercial projects.

The biggest challenge is perhaps wading your way through them to choose which ones to use. In 2023, there are now 1,576 font families in the Google Fonts library. It would take a long time to sift through them all. But we, and the designers that contribute to the site, have done just that. And we've picked out a sample of the very best Google fonts that we think are good options to start with.

Space Mono is an original fixed-width type family, developed for editorial use in headline and display typography by Colophon Foundry. Its letterforms combine a geometric foundation with grotesque details to evoke the spirit of 1960s newspaper headlines. Its features include old-style figures, superscript and subscript numerals, fractions, centre-height and cap-height currency symbols, directional arrows, and multiple stylistic alternates.

The result of a project led by Australian type designer Wei Huang, Work Sans is a typeface family based loosely on early Grotesques. While it can be used in both print and web design, features have been simplified and optimised for screen resolutions; for example, diacritic marks are larger than how they would be in print. The fonts closer to the extreme weights, meanwhile, are designed more for display use. Since 2020, it's been upgraded to a variable font family.

Alegreya is a multi-award-winning typeface originally designed for literature. Designed by Juan Pablo del Peral for Huerta Tipográfica, it boasts a dynamic and varied rhythm which makes the reading of long passages a visual pleasure. Making subtle references to calligraphy, this typeface superfamily (which includes both serif and sans-serif families) offers a great combination of style, authority and diversity.

Archivo Narrow is a grotesque sans-serif typeface family that’s designed to be used simultaneously in print and digital platforms. Best used for highlights and headlines, this family was derived from Chivo and is reminiscent of late nineteenth century American typefaces. Crafted by Omnibus-Type for high performance typography, it supports over 200 world languages, and includes normal, Narrow and Black styles.

Created by Mark Simonson, Anonymous Pro is a fixed-width typeface family designed with coding in mind. It gives characters that could be mistaken for one another (O, 0, I, l, 1, etc.) distinct shapes, to make them easier to tell apart in the context of source code. Also, the regular and bold styles have embedded bitmaps for the smallest sizes (10-13 ppem.) It was inspired by Anonymous 9, a freeware Macintosh bitmap font developed in the mid-'90s by Susan Lesch and David Lamkins as a more legible alternative to Monaco, the fixed-width Macintosh system font.

Sora’s large x-height and generous counters makes it a great choice for app and web interfaces, where clarity and effectiveness at any size is vitally important. This typeface family was commissioned for the Japanese company of the same name, the blockchain specialists best known for creating the world's first central bank digital currency. Sora takes its cue from low-resolution aesthetics and early screen typography, without being weighed down by nostalgia.

Inter is a variable font family featuring a tall x-height, in order to improve readability in passages of mixed-case and lower-case text. The provision of contextual alternates allows you to adjust punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, plus there’s a slashed zero, for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o". The Inter project is led by Rasmus Andersson, a Swedish software designer living in San Francisco.

Lato is a sans-serif typeface family designed by Warsaw-based designer Åukasz Dziedzic ('Lato' means 'Summer' in Polish). Originally, Lato was conceived as a set of corporate fonts for a large client – who in the end decided to go in different stylistic direction, so the family became available for a public release. The semi-rounded details of the letters give Lato a feeling of warmth, while the strong structure provides stability and seriousness.

How do I download and install Google fonts?

Navigate to the Google Fonts website and Select a font you want to download. Select 'download family' or select only one style. To install Google Fonts in Windows, unzip the downloaded folder and select install. On a Mac, you'll need to unzip the font file somewhere, double click on the .ttf or .otf file to open Font Book and preview the font to make sure it appears how you want, and then select Install in Font Book.

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Aaron Kitney is a freelance graphic designer and art director based in London and Vancouver. He specialises in branding, identity, web design, publication design, packaging and book design.

The best Google Fonts