Google Fonts & Icons
Making type and typography accessible and available to everyone.
As co-founder and Design Manager for Google Fonts I’m responsible for all of Google’s font development projects (including Google Sans, Roboto, Noto, etc.), Google’s icons (Material Symbols, used by all Google products) and Google’s open source font catalog at fonts.google.com
Google Fonts and our icons are used by all of Google’s products, Material Design, and over half of the websites on the web,
The recent redesign of our website was recognized with a Webby Award for Best User Interface 2024, Google Sans Flex, the newest version of Google’s brand typeface, received a Red Dot Design Award for Typeface Design 2024.
I’m leading a team of designers and UX program managers, working with a network of external type foundries and design vendors as well as collaborating with teams throughout the company.
Open source fonts & icons
Google Fonts now offers over 1700 open source font families to everyone without any payment required. The fonts can be downloaded or they can be used via the CSS or Android APIs. According to the HTTP Archive, in 2024 more than half of all web pages on the internet use Google Fonts. They're also available in Google Docs, Slides, Forms, Slides, YouTube and Ads.
Our last redesign that simplified the use of Google Fonts was regognized with the Webby 2024: Winner, Best Visual Design
Material Symbols is an open source variable icon set that comprises over 3000 individual UI icons and is used across Google's products and by developers on the web and in the Android ecosystem.
Typography at Google
Google Fonts is for Google's own fonts, like Google Sans, YouTube Sans and Roboto.
Google Sans is Google's brand font and is used whereever the Google is shown. It is also the typeface used in all of Google's UIs. The next version of Google Sans, called Google Sans Flex, has received the Red Dot Design Award for Typeface Design 2024.
Roboto is the default typeface for Material Design and is on use on billions of Android devices around the globe.
Material Design Typography Guidelines
Google Fonts collaborates closely with Material Design to create and evolve the Material Typography Guidelines for external and internal developers.
Font development
The Google Fonts catalog has grown to over 1700 font families including many contributions from the open source community. All fonts have to comply with minimum requirements of quality and glyph coverage and our team will get involved in their completion to various degrees.
For priority font projects we will commission type foundries from around the world. A few examples are shown below:
Roboto Serif
Roboto Serif is a variable typeface family designed to create a comfortable and frictionless reading experience. Minimal and highly functional, it is useful anywhere.
Roboto Flex
Roboto Flex—a major upgrade to Roboto. With a huge range of weights and widths across optical sizes, Roboto Flex was designed to be super scalable, adaptable, amd customizable.
Noto fonts
Noto is a collection of high-quality fonts with multiple weights and widths in sans, serif, mono, and other styles in more than 1,000 languages and over 150 writing systems.
Shantell Sans
British visual artist and philosopher Shantell Martin is famous for using words in her artwork. To inspire others to have fun with writing and words, she teamed up with Arrow Type to create Shantell Sans.
Kablammo
The Dancing Font from Outer Space. The animated variable font Kablammo has landed on planet Earth
Tilt
Initially sparked by the experience of seeing a neon sign from the side, Tilt was created to allow the orientation of glyphs to be rotated horizontally and vertically.
Fonts Knowledge
Google Fonts Knowledge: a rich library of guides to the world of typography, created by typographic experts from around the globe. This supplement to the Google Fonts catalog covers universal principles of typography for any medium, enabling designers and developers of all skill sets to choose and use type with purpose.
