Looking at the Most Popular Google Fonts

February 27, 2018

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Looking at the Most Popular Google Fonts

The impact Google Fonts has had on the web is undeniable. Since its somewhat humble beginnings in 2010, the 800+ fonts now hosted by the library have been viewed well over 19 trillion times. Of course, the likes of Adobe and others have followed suit with font repositories of their own. The difference is that everything Google Fonts has to offer is free.

And it’s a good thing that free web fonts have come along. Typography on the web used to be incredibly boring. It started out with the limitation that a specific font had to be on a user’s system in order to be viewed correctly in a browser. Eventually, @font-face brought more options to the table. But licensing issues were often difficult to deal with (if dealt with at all).

The brilliance of Google Fonts is the flexibility you have with where and how you use it. You can load fonts via Google’s service or download them to place on your own server or device. Plus, they receive contributions from font artists worldwide. That has led to an incredible variety of available styles.

Of course, some fonts tend to be more popular than others. Thanks to the openness of the library, Google provides a nifty Analytics page that breaks down how much usage each font receives. Let’s take a look at 10 of the most-used fonts in the library. Note that, in some cases, multiple members of the same font family are separate entries on Google’s list. We’ll avoid repeating ourselves in those instances.