Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography

When you have some text, how can you choose a typeface? Many people—professional designers included—go through an app’s font menu until we find one we like. But the aim of this Google Fonts Knowledge module is to show that there are many considerations that can improve our type choices.

We all use type every day, from word processors and social media graphic apps to professional desktop design software and hand-coded websites. Good typography is within everyone’s reach, and it starts with the fundamentals.

A typeface is what you see; a font is what you use.

Open Sans is a humanist sans serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson, Type Director of Ascender Corp. This version contains the complete 897 character set, which includes the standard ISO Latin 1, Latin CE, Greek and Cyrillic character sets.

Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography

Barlow is a slightly rounded, low-contrast, grotesk type family. Drawing from the visual style of the California public, Barlow shares qualities with the state's car plates, highway signs, busses, and trains.

Sora typeface was designed to capture Soramitsu's spirit and heritage resulting in a type family with cues of low-resolution aesthetics and early screen typography but without nostalgia, as every decision was considered towards the crisp digital environment of today.

Play is a minimalistic sans serif typeface designed by Jonas Hecksher during his time as Type Director of Playtype Type Foundry. All letters in Play derive from the 'O' – square and circular at the same time.

A simple but thorough checklist to reference every time we need to choose a new typeface, with each item explained in detail.