Servage Magazine

Text is a core part of any website or mobile application. Textual content delivers messages effectively with familiarity and ease. Text renders on all devices and is a key component in the designing process, via content layouts.

Text is made up of fonts, its styles, and special characters. Therefore, fonts are an underlying element of all written content. If you intend to decorate your web page or mobile application UIs, you need access to proper font families and their variants.

For instance, a large font size and bold weight is ideal text for headers, titles, and sub-titles. Italic fonts add visual emphasis to words or phrases and look robust, when used judiciously. Bold words grab the immediate attention of your readers, and in many cases from bots that crawl the content of a web page. Font colors deliver particular messages to readers, such as: red for warnings and grey for subtle notes. How you use fonts to style texts is entirely up to you, as a designer.

Acquiring Fonts in the Past

A decade ago, we didn’t have easy access to free fonts on the web, as we do today. We used to spend some money in order to decorate body text of our clients’ content and their design layouts, advertisements, and banners. Experimental font designers released edgy fonts that were often times awkward to employ, while professionals might offer free fonts of standard or useful families, but only in a single weight. Thus, bold and italics, as well as their other variants were not readily available, unless you purchased their full set of font offerings.

Free Fonts in Modern Web Designing

Web designing today has changed significantly, due to the emergence of open source communities on several fronts. Google is the leading open source community that continues to diversify web development. They have brought forth a free fonts community, offering a well-structured platform—Google Fonts. Thanks to the efforts of this open source community, we now have easy access to magnificent and useful font families, with all possible variants and open licenses. Let’s check out some of the highly used font families that are available for free on the web.

Alegreya Fonts

In 2011, the Letter2 competition declared Alegreya as one of the 53 “Fonts of the Decade.” This serif typeface, originally designed for print, is now readily available online and performs excellent on the web.

If you look at the Beef website, you will see the Alegreya font in the body which pairs well with the Avenir font used in the heading. Moreover, the beautiful bold-italic style of Alegreya, used in the heading of the job description of this Beef website, grabs the reader’s attention.

Source Sans Pro Fonts

Like Google, Adobe has launched free fonts. You can view its solid contribution with Source Sans Pro fonts, released in 2012. Unlike earlier Gothics, Source Sans Pro fonts render flawlessy in all scales of UI, displaying on different devices, including mobiles.

These fonts have an impressive array of six weights, which make it a versatile consideration for web and mobile designers. If you take a gander at the CAST83 website, you’ll find this single font family throughout the entire site, in differing and appropriate weights. Their smart usage of heavy weight on smaller sized texts with lighter weight in headings, makes the web page both fascinating and undeniably professional.

Here are some other grand and useful font families available on the web for free:

• Open Sans
• Anonymous Pro
• Playfair Display
• Roboto
• Lato
• Merriweather
• Karla
• Clear Sans
• Fira Sans

References & More Reading

Taking A Second Look At Free Fonts
Alegreya
Source Sans Pro