Better Google Fonts

Google Web Fonts is an awe­some source of free, open source fonts hooked up to a world-class CDN. It’s also, sad­ly, filled with one-off nov­el­ty fonts vying for the title of “the new Com­ic Sans.”

I quick­ly dis­cov­ered that a good met­ric for high­er-qual­i­ty fonts was the pres­ence of at least one alter­nate. The Google Web Fonts direc­to­ry does not allow that type of fil­ter­ing, so I built this sim­ple one-off page that allows you to browse mul­ti-vari­ant type­faces. The lay­out is respon­sive, and click­ing the font name takes you to Google’s spec­i­men for that font.

All list­ed fonts are all down­loaded. It should go with­out say­ing that the page will load slowly.

Missed the link above? Go view Bet­ter Google Fonts. And, if you like code, it’s on GitHub for your fork­ing pleasure.

Tagged , , | By Matt | Posted in Design | Comments (11)

11 Comments

  1. Shane Guymon
    Posted July 19, 2011 at 1:22 pm | Permalink

    This is awe­some! Will you be updat­ing this site as new fonts are added?

  2. Matt
    Posted July 19, 2011 at 1:31 pm | Permalink

    Shane: this makes use of their new API (cur­rent­ly still in devel­op­er beta), so it will always reflect the cur­rent state of the directory.

  3. Ricky de Laveaga
    Posted July 19, 2011 at 2:29 pm | Permalink

    nice work! sore­ly needed

  4. Matt
    Posted July 24, 2011 at 6:42 pm | Permalink

    @Ricky Thanks!

  5. Noah Funk
    Posted February 10, 2012 at 8:04 pm | Permalink

    very use­ful, thank you. classy pre­sen­ta­tion also

  6. Jens Weigel
    Posted February 23, 2012 at 10:46 am | Permalink

    This is so needful!

    Would be nice also to have some options. I.e.: What kind of Weights and styles are needed?
    x Regular
    x Bold
    x Italic
    x ItalicBold
    … and so on.
    Also an addi­tion­al check­box for Serif, Non-Serif, …

    Have seen that the API does­nt pro­vide that all but maybe soon I hope. My jQuery knowl­edge are very poor, oth­er­wise I would help with fork­ing your project.

  7. Matt
    Posted February 23, 2012 at 11:34 am | Permalink

    @Jens All good ideas. The weight and ital­ic check­box­es would be pos­si­ble, but not the serif, sans, etc, since the API does­n’t expose that data cur­rent­ly. I may get around to the do-able part at some point. In the mean­time, maybe this is a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn JavaScript!

  8. AIM Soiree
    Posted September 7, 2012 at 7:17 am | Permalink

    Very use­ful, cheers Matt

  9. Tom
    Posted April 27, 2013 at 11:17 am | Permalink

    Bril­liant, thanks for this! The Google Web Fonts UI and font selec­tion is absolute­ly hor­ren­dous; hav­ing (some­what) fil­tered list is so, so useful.

  10. Kenneth Mansfield
    Posted March 10, 2014 at 1:31 pm | Permalink

    OH NO!! Is it gone?! I book­marked the page because it is SOOOOO use­ful. Today, there’s noth­ing on it. 🙁

  11. Matt
    Posted March 10, 2014 at 2:47 pm | Permalink

    @Kenneth — still there. Maybe there was an issue with the Google Fonts API for a time.