The new Google Fonts database is a design geek's paradise

Google Fonts has been an invaluable web resource since the search giant launched the database in 2010. The goal has been to create a bank of open-source fonts and match it with underlying engineering to enable those fonts to work quickly and efficiently across millions of websites viewed billions of times a day. The old Google Fonts, however, doesn't match the design-centric philosophy behind the initiative. So Google let its design team give the website a visual overhaul to make its interface easier to use and more aesthetically pleasing.

The new Google Fonts is now in line with the company's Material Design guidelines. It has both a new logo and a far easier way to test out new fonts, compare them with others, and change preferences on the fly while viewing sample text in a four-font grid. You can filter by categories like Serif and Handwriting, sort through trending and popular fonts, filter by language, and toggle between different degrees of thickness and slant. Each of the more than 800 open-source fonts available now also contains bio information on its designer, as well as statistics on its usage and a list of popular fonts to pair it with. Google Fonts will let you either download the font or give you the code to directly embed it into your site.

• ViaThe Next Web
• SourceGoogle Fonts Google Design Blog