Best Typography ✒️ Resources & Tools 🛠️ for Every Developers and Designer 🤩
Tags: Creativity, Typography, Design, Webdev, Productivity

Ever wondered, how some of the products/apps/websites drag the mass and attention? Why they outperform others? Well, it might interest you to know that, typography alongside design and colors plays a major role..!!

You find some products/apps/websites more attractive compared to others not just because of design but the typography have a large impact on readers’ mind as well.

In this article, we will go through some of the best online resources and tools which provide some awesome, unique fonts, typography styling, and spacing tools, font pairing with machine learning. Being developer and designer these typography resources are handy to use and bookmark.

Before we go through the list here is a short overview of typography.

What is Typography?

In general, typography is the art of arranging letters and text in a way that makes the copy legible, clear, and visually appealing to the reader. Typography involves many things like font style, appearance, and structure, which aims to extract certain emotions and delivers specific messages. In short, we can say that typography is something that brings the text to life.

Importance Of Typography in the Modern World.

Typography maintains consistency throughout a website, giving it a more professional aesthetic. Perfect typography will establish a strong visual hierarchy and will provide a graphical balance to the website, which eventually sets the product’s overall tone. It can help to make your content attractive and impacts the readability of your site which all leads to positive user experience.

Reasons why it is important for the product:

1. Builds brand image

Good typography enhances the website’s overall image. It also impacts your users as they will eventually begin to link the typeface featured on your site with your brand. Unique and consistent typography is the way to establish a strong user following, build trust with your users, and help to carry your brand forward.

2. Affects the audience

It is a fact that fonts styling, usage of patterns, and designs affect the users. They grasp and perceive the information delivered by the text. The eye-catching type is much more persuasive than weak fonts that don’t reinforce the message of the text. So, it is highly necessary that you pick good, impressive fonts and patterns.

3. Drags the attention of the readers

Typography impacts users’ interests directly. It decides if someone is going to stay on your website for one minute or half an hour. So, it’s very important that your website is visually enriched and graphically memorable, and typography plays a huge role in this process.

How to select proper fonts and typefaces for your product?

It’s a fact that the typography you use reflects the personality of the brand or product. So, it is necessary to choose the right typeface.

Well, there are many factors that play a pivotal role. The following are the factors that affect the most,

Industry trends

Purpose of brand

Message your brand wants to deliver

Readability

Font combination and contrast

After analyzing the mentioned aspects above, you’ll be more clear on what fonts, style, colors, size, the combination will be perfect for your project.

Although, it also depends on personal choice and experience. Some typefaces are more suitable for a design task than others. Appropriateness is something you learn by both experiences with a typeface and by other attributes of the typeface, including its history and original purpose.

So, go through the list once you are sure about what you want..!!

For more info, you can check out this amazing blog: Beginners’ Guide To Typography.

Before you go through the list you can also check the following video.

Note: Most fonts from the websites listed below are free, but some are free for personal use only, so if you’d like to use them in commercial projects, you’d have to buy a commercial license.

Free fonts website

With Google Fonts, you can share and integrate typography into any design project seamlessly no matter where you are in the world. All the fonts in the catalog are free and open-source. It helps in making beautiful types accessible to anyone for any project. This means you can share favorites and collaborate easily with friends and colleagues.

Besides, this typography library includes more than 900 fonts on the same screen. It also offers you an interactive web directory for exploring the library, and the APIs to use these fonts via Android and CSS, and filter them out as per your design guidelines.

DaFont is an awesome platform that offers you any and every type of typography. There are many categories, like Cartoon, Decorative, Western, Mexican, sci-fi, Groovy, graffiti, kids, Horror, Christmas, and many more. You can find the latest ad-ons on the home page, and you can submit your own font, too.

Besides, you can test each font with custom texts, just to see how things would look. You can also adjust the size, choosing from four different sizing options. Once you are ready to proceed, just click the download button and done…!!

Font Squirrel is a helpful collection of commercial-free fonts in an easy-to-use format. It also offers useful resources such as a font blog, font identifier, & a forum.

4. Fontfabric : A digital type foundry crafting retail fonts and custom typography for various brands.

Font fabric is an awesome collection of fonts and offers a variety of unique styles. Clients include high-profile global brands such as Nike, Lipton, Hyundai, CNET, Nestlé, Transavia, and the US national football team.

FontsArena is a curated typography website with a focus on contemporary typography and high-quality free fonts. Set in Sheepman (logo), Colfax (Webfont) & Cartograph Mono CF (secondary Webfont).

You can also search for a font by keyword, or by category. Some of the available categories include Best, Sans, Variable, Serif, etc. You can preview any word you like before purchasing the font. All fonts come with descriptions, where you can also check the font license, which languages the selected font supports, etc.

Use & Modify is yet another awesome open source typography tool. It is a personal selection of beautiful, classy, punk, professional, incomplete, weird typefaces. It is free to use and modify. Simply select the font you like and modify it.

Open Foundry is a free platform for curated open-source typefaces; to highlight their beauty, activate ideas, and encourage exploration. You can select the style and simply type to see the results. There are also different spacing features available to A-test, change color, and even adjust the background. This collection offers different display options for typefaces. You can experiment with sizing, backgrounds, kerning, and more straight from Open Foundry’s interface.

1001 Fonts is a large collection of various types of fonts and designs. Here you will find different types and styles like 3D, Calligraphy, Christmas, Cartoon, Easter, Famous, and many more. Also, you can get a live demonstration. Type in the preview box, select the size and color and then hit the update button. The best thing is you’ll get all the previews for each font together.

9. Abstractfonts : Download, view, test-drive, bookmark free fonts

Abstractfonts is an open-source tool that offers many different types of fonts.

Fonts tools

11. Tiff: A type of diff tool that visually contrasts the differences between two fonts

Tiff is a tool that visually contrasts the differences between the two fonts. It is a typography tool that helps to illustrate the graphical differences between the two fonts. Pick a pair of fonts from their massive databank, and the website will display the fonts on top of one another or side-by-side so that you may compare the two.

Archetypeapp lets designers create consistent typography styling and spacing live, right in the browser. It is a simple to use tool that helps you make beautiful font combinations, tweak their sizing relationship and spacing, and export the results as CSS or as a Sketch file.

13. Layout Grid Calculator: The easiest way to create a perfect layout grid

Layout Grid Calculator is an Adobe InDesign plug-in that helps you create the perfect typographic grid and perfect baseline grid. It also helps you choose the right font size from a harmonious type scale inspired by the way music works.

The type-scale calculator gives the designer the ability to assign different typographic elements (title, subtitle, legend, etc.) to any term in the sequence. It is a simple visual calculator to determine the appropriate style for your website. All you need to do is enter the base font size for paragraph text, and then select from surrounding values for headers and small text.

by Jeremy Church

GRT calculator is an actual calculator that can recommend a font type and style. With the Golden Ratio Typography Calculator, all designers have to do is enter the information, press the button, and they will get recommendations on what font will look the best for whatever project they’re working on.

It helps,

Discover the perfect typography for your website by entering your current font, font size, and content width

the perfect typography for your website by entering your current font, font size, and content width Optimize for font size, line height, and even characters per line (CPL)

for font size, line height, and even characters per line (CPL) Experiment with new fonts and different sizes on any device

The GRT Calculator is actually a design system calculator that provides the foundational elements you’ll need for every project:

a typographic scale based on your primary font size,

based on your primary font size, associated line heights , and

, and spacing units derived from the primary line-height

Fontspark is a simple tool to help designers quickly find the best fonts for their projects. By randomly generating fonts from a curated list of popular web fonts, designers have many amazing options instead of using the same one again and again for their next website or design.

Font Joy is another impressive typography tool that every designer must keep in their creative toolkit. Based on the concept of Machine learning, this tool gives you the freedom to experiment with different combinations of font and find the best contrasting yet complementary typography to leave an everlasting impression.

All you have to do is click (Generate) to create a new font pairing, (Lock) to lock fonts that you want to keep, and (Edit) to choose a font manually. The text is editable, try replacing it with your company name or other copy.

The goal of font pairing is to select fonts that share an overarching theme yet have a pleasing contrast. Which fonts work together is largely a matter of intuition, but this tool approach this problem with a neural net.

Font Pair is a typography site dedicated to helping creators use beautiful typography for their creative projects. Its aim is to empower all to design. All you need to do is simply click anywhere in the paragraph or heading text and start typing. You can copy and paste your own content to see what it looks like with these font combinations.

Misc & Learning

Leon Sans is a geometric sans-serif typeface made with code by Jongmin Kim. It allows users to change font-weight dynamically and to create custom animations, effects, or shapes in the Canvas element of HTML5.

For demo visit: https://leon-kim.com/examples/#all

Typekit Practice is a collection of resources and a place to try things, hone your skills, and stay sharp.

This platform empowers you to look into different font styles belonging to the same font family as well as keep your knowledge updated through its resources section.

In other words, this platform is a complete package in itself where you can learn, download, and practice different font styles to polish your designing skills.

Made by Adobe Typekit.

21. Lexend : Change the way the world reads.

It is available both on Google Fonts & as an open-source download.

22. Rough Font Awesome: Rough.js meets Font Awesome

Font Flipper is a free web app that lets you preview 800+ Google Fonts on top of your own designs, without having to download the fonts first. You’ll play “Hot or Not” to collect fonts you like, and then you can download them to use.

Drag/Upload any of your favorite images then edit then click on the place you wan to put your text. You’ll get many features along with like size, style, color, gradients, shapes, and many more. It helps execute your imagination in the most creative way.

Conclusion:

Each website from the list is a great source of all types of fonts and typography inspiration. You don’t need to use overused fonts all the time. Take some time, see if it’s suitable for your project or not, and then select the one you find appropriate. Be creative and don’t be afraid to try something new and fresh in your work.

We have made this collection so that you can explore these tools without wasting your time and see how it can help you in creating visually engaging products/apps/websites.

These were just some examples of typography tools that can help you develop a good product. There are many other fantastic typography tools out there. If we have missed your favorite tool on our list, then do tell us about it in the comments below!

Be creative, take your time, and have fun customizing your products/apps/websites’ typography!