Google Fonts is a large library of free-to-use fonts that you can download or load straight from Google to use on your own website. They have a variety of fonts, styles and weights available, and their collection continues to grow.
To help you choose the perfect font for your website, discover our 30 Best Google Fonts in 2023.
18 Best Google Sans Serif Fonts in 2023
1. Roboto
Roboto is the most downloaded font on the Google Fonts website, and it’s not hard to see why. Clean, stylish and smart while simultaneously professional and friendly, Roboto is the default font for Android and Chrome OS and is the font of choice in Google’s Material Design system. Roboto is simple and highly readable, for web and mobile use.
2. Lato
Lato is a sanserif typeface family designed by Warsaw-based designer Lukasz Dziedzic. The semi-rounded details of the letters give Lato a feeling of warmth, while the strong structure provides stability and seriousness.
3. Open Sans
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. Open Sans was designed with an upright stress, open forms and a neutral, yet friendly appearance.
4. Oswald
Oswald is a reworking of the classic gothic typeface style historically represented by designs such as ‘Alternate Gothic’. The characters of Oswald have been 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.
5. Source Sans Pro
Source Sans Pro is a sans-serif font from Paul Hunt that was created for Adobe and was Adobe’s first open-source font.
6. Montserrat
The old posters and signs in the traditional Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires inspired Julieta Ulanovsky to design this typeface and rescue the beauty of urban typography that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century.
7. Raleway
Raleway is an elegant sans-serif typeface, designed in a single thin weight. It 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.
8. PT Sans
PT Sans is based on Russian sans serif types of the second part of the 20th century, but at the same time has distinctive features of contemporary humanistic designs. The family consists of 8 styles: 4 basic styles, 2 captions styles for small sizes, and 2 narrows styles for economic typesetting.
9. Roboto Condensed
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 grotesques 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.
10. Poppins
Poppins, created by the Indian Type Foundry, is an attractive, geometric sans-serif font for use in text or display contexts. It’s also the first font on our list to support the Devanagari system, which is used in over 150 languages including Hindi and Sanskrit.
11. Noto Sans
Noto helps to make the web more beautiful across platforms for all languages. Currently, Noto covers over 30 scripts and will cover all of Unicode in the future. This is the Sans Latin, Greek and Cyrillic family. It has Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic styles and is hinted.
12. Ubuntu
The Ubuntu Font Family are a set of matching new libre/open fonts in development during 2010-2011. The development is being funded by Canonical Ltd on behalf of the wider Free Software community and the Ubuntu project. The new Ubuntu Font Family was started to enable the personality of Ubuntu to be seen and felt in every menu, button and dialog. The typeface is sans-serif, uses OpenType features and is manually hinted for clarity on desktop and mobile computing screens.
13. Work Sans
Work Sans is a typeface family based loosely on early Grotesques, such as those by Stephenson Blake, Miller & Richard and Bauerschen Giesserei. The Regular weight and others in the middle of the family are optimized for on-screen text usage at medium-sizes (14px-48px) and can also be used in print design. The fonts closer to the extreme weights are designed more for display use both on the web and in print.
14. Nunito Sans
Another Vernon Adams creation, Nunito is a sans-serif font designed as a display font. With 8 different weights available, it’s a versatile, attractive font which we’d recommend using when you want a smart, stylish sans-serif heading.
15. Fira Sans
Designed to integrate with the character of the Mozilla FirefoxOS, the Fira typefaces also aim to cover the legibility needs for a large range of handsets varying in screen quality and rendering. The Fira font family comes in 3 widths, all accompanied by italic styles.
16. Quicksand
Quicksand is a display sans serif with rounded terminals. The project was initiated by Andrew Paglinawan in 2008 using geometric shapes as a core foundation. It is designed for display purposes but kept legible enough to use in small sizes as well. In 2016, in collaboration with Andrew, it was thoroughly revised by Thomas Jockin to improve quality. In 2019, Mirko Velimirovic converted the family into a variable font.
17. Dosis
Dosis is a very simple, monoline rounded sans serif. We like you to have some freedom over how the letters should look, so we bundled Dosis with a few alternates that you can use to make your text look the way you want to. You can access all of them by selecting “Stylistic Alternates” in Photoshop, or activate one by one using Stylistic sets 1 to 5 in InDesign.
18. Titillium Web
Titillium is born inside the Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino as a didactic project Course Type design of the Master of Visual Design Campi Visivi.
12 Best Google Serif Fonts in 2021
19. Merriweather
Eben Sorkin’s Merriweather is designed for optimal readability on screens. Merriweather’s large x-height boosts the font’s legibility, making it suitable for use in long texts as well as for headlines and titles. Merriweather currently has 8 styles: Light, Regular, Bold, Black, Light Italic, Italic, Bold Italic, Black Italic.
20. Playfair Display
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.
21. Lora
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.
22. PT Serif
PT Serif is the second pan-Cyrillic font family developed for the project ‘Public Types of the Russian Federation’. The first family of the project, PT Sans, was released in 2009. PT Serif is designed for use together with PT Sans, and is harmonized across metrics, proportions, weights and design.
23. Source Serif Pro
Source Serif Pro is a serif typeface in the transitional style, designed to complement the Source Sans Pro family. 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.
24. Arvo
Arvo is a geometric slab-serif typeface family suited for screen and print. The flavor of the font is rather mixed, being nearly monolinear to increase legibility. Arvo is an Estonian name that is not widely used for boys today.
25. Crimson Text
Crimson Text is a font family for book production in the tradition of beautiful old-style typefaces. There are a lot of great free fonts around, but one kind is missing: those Garamond-inspired types with all the little niceties like old-style figures, small caps, fleurons, math characters and the like.
26. Zilla Slab
Zilla Slab is Mozilla’s core typeface, used for the Mozilla wordmark, headlines and throughout their designs. A contemporary slab serif, based on Typotheque’s Tesla, it is constructed with smooth curves and true italics, which gives the text an unexpectedly sophisticated industrial look and a friendly approachability in all weights.
27. IBM Plex Serif
IBM Plex is an international typeface family designed by Mike Abbink, IBM BX&D, in collaboration with Bold Monday, an independent Dutch type foundry. Plex was designed to capture IBM’s spirit and history, and to illustrate the unique relationship between mankind and machine—a principal theme for IBM since the turn of the century
28. Libre Baskerville
Libre Baskerville is a web font optimized for body text (typically 16px.) It is based on the American Type Founder’s Baskerville from 1941, but it has a taller x-height, wider counters and a little less contrast, that allow it to work well for reading on-screen.
29. Slabo 27px
Slabo is a collection of size-specific fonts for use in online advertising and other web uses. The collection currently includes this font, Slabo 27px, and Slabo 13px. Each font in the collection is fine-tuned for use at the pixel size in its name.
30. EB Garamond
EB Garamond is intended to be an excellent, classical, Garamond. It is a community project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typefaces from the mid-16th century. This digital version reproduces the original design by Claude Garamont closely: The source for the letterforms is a scan of a specimen known as the “Berner specimen,” which was composed in 1592 by Conrad Berner, the son-in-law of Christian Egenolff and his successor at the Egenolff print office.
Conclusion
Google Fonts are an incredibly powerful and versatile resource for your website. Giving you access to over 1017 fonts, Google Fonts can make your website look better while boosting its performance and improving the overall speed of the internet.
Overall, these fonts have brought about a typographic revolution to the web. That’s something we designers should all be thankful for.
