Top 10 Free Web Fonts Designers Most Use
Released - March 16th, 2017
Here we have gathered a list of top 10 free web fonts that are most used by designers in their projects. It’s important to know a few popular free web fonts because it often seems troublesome to find appropriate fonts online if you have no prior idea. Designers generally look for fonts to use in different levels of titles/headings or subtitles/subheadings, paragraphs, quotes and other point texts. There is a helpful website that shows how to pair two fonts for heading and paragraph with numerous examples. So, if you have a solid knowledge of which free fonts suit the best for these individual purposes, you will be comfortable to use them in your next projects. In fact, as a web designer, other than just grabbing some free fonts, you should research and study more on the subject of typography and develop your own principles of using fonts in your future projects.
The effective use of fonts in the web pages with appropriate styling is popularly known as web typography. However, in the modern trend of typography, the term encompasses more ideas than just choosing a range of preferred fonts. There is a lot more things to consider while designing webpages with typographic elements. There are things like leading, kerning etc. as well as other technical styling criteria to consider for a successful typographic presentation of your content. You can learn more about web typography studying things elucidated here.
At the beginning of the web industry, the fonts for the texts in webpages primarily depended on the individual browser settings. Sometimes the fonts needed to be installed on the visitor’s computer. The remote website owner or the designer had little to do with which fonts to display on the user’s screen. However, the time has changed and designers can now set fonts with fixed styling to their contents and expect the contents to display in the same way in the visitors computer.
Moreover, the limitation of accessing the font from visitors system is now over and the fonts can be sourced from various online font services such as Font Squirrel, Google Web Fonts service and Adobe Edge Web Fonts etc. The services are becoming increasingly popular among the web designers. Apart from paid fonts, these services also offer plenty of free high quality fonts for you to use in your tight-budget projects.
The free fonts, in popular opinion, are poorly designed and can often lack the uniqueness that you require to develop your own brand. The brand development with using fonts can also be hindered by free fonts, as they have comparatively higher rate of usability than the premium paid ones. As the free fonts are readily available to anyone, the more people are using the same fonts for their project as you; as a result, if you are going to develop your own business brand, the same free font might not be a good choice. They might also come short of font-family (variants of a given font for style, weight, serif-use, scaling etc.) that the designers essentially require to style the various parts of their web page contents.
On the other hand, the paid fonts have all the excellence and fine-tuning applied to them by the professional typographers and designers. Subsequently, they emerge as the high standard, premium quality fonts and stand out unique to its free counterparts. They may also come with additional options like full font family. These paid fonts are more suitable to develop your own business branding as they have the less rate of usability. However, these fonts can only be availed by donating a good amount to the developers. So if you have the budget and would like to consider buying a paid font, you can look for it in the popular Myfonts, Fonts.com and Font Spring services.
Google Fonts is the most popular free font service that offers a huge library of high quality open-source fonts. Google usually takes care of the standard of the fonts when submitted in their font service website, so the fonts are meant to be decent. There are plenty of other free font services that offer good collections of fonts with maximum standard.
Below is the two separate lists of top 10 free web fonts that are most used by web designers for web page content headings and paragraphs. Our long year experienced EcologyTheme designers highly recommend them for design projects. However, the lists are randomly ordered and no priority or preferences considered.
Following are the best 10 free web fonts extremely popular with web designers to use in content headings.
1. Montserrat
2. Ubuntu
4. Oswald
5. Roboto Slab
6. Railway
8. Arvo
9. Bebas Nule
10. Hind
The next 10 free web fonts are widely used by web designers for paragraph texts.
1. Opens Sans
2. Roboto
4. Raleway
5. Lato
6. Poppins
7. PT Sans
8. Droid Sans
9. Lora
10. Titillium Web
So, the two lists above present the most popular free web fonts for web design projects, especially when it comes to design the different levels of headings, titles, paragraphs as well as other point texts for buttons and navigations.
