As more and more designers adopt a content-first approach, designing the right typographic system for your website becomes even more important.
Typography is the style, arrangement, and appearance of text. So it’s not just the font you use, but also the size of the text, length of content, and style (like color, italics, etc).
Big collection of Free Fonts for Download. Browse fonts by style, by type, by alphabet, by author or by popularity. Everyday updates! In this article, you will find a collection of the best typography tools available on the web. What’s more, they’re all absolutely free! If you’re a web designer or developer, then these tools are going to save you some serious time and effort.
This means that we designers should not only understand the ins and outs of typography, but also take advantage of the many typographic tools available.
Here are a few of my favorites you’re sure to love.
1. Educate yourself with Typekit Practice
You can teach yourself about type in all kinds of ways, but Typekit Practice has always been one of my favorites.
I’m a big fan of Typekit (especially since it’s so easy to use your Typekit fonts in Webflow) and the lessons they provide here are just as effective as they are easy to get through. It’s my go-to for both education and practice, since you can try your hand at many of their lessons on CodePen.
2. Identify that font with FontFace Ninja
Have you ever been on a site and wondered, “Wow, what font is this?!” While you can dig through Chrome Dev Tools (by right clicking and choosing Inspect Element) to find out, there’s a much easier way.
The FontFace Ninja Chrome lets you identify the font family, weight, and even the font size used anywhere on a site — all by hovering.
3. Discover new fonts through Hoefler&Co.
The Hoefler&Co. font foundry boasts some of my favorite fonts on the web. Their Discover.typography site offers a great place for discovering new fonts (and layout ideas) via beautiful typesetting experiments.
4. Find the perfect font with Typewolf
Picking the perfect font for your next project can be a huge challenge. It takes a lot of thought and, often, a bit of trial and error.
Typewolf is an incredible resource for designers who want to see how real type performs on a site, as opposed to the age-old “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Check out font recommendations and lists, sites with inspiring uses of type, and more.
5. Pair your fonts with Font Flame
While there are exceptions, most websites feature at least two fonts: one for headings and callouts, and another for body text. Picking the right pairing is super important, since they need to complement each other to create a good reading experience. Font Flame is a Tinder-like tool that lets you match fonts with ease and see them together before trying them out.
Master the fundamental concepts of web design, including typography, color theory, visual design, and so much more.
6. Get your type hierarchy right with Modular Scale
Once you’ve nailed your font pairing, it’s time to start considering your hierarchy — the size relationships between different heading levels and body text. A well-considered hierarchy helps people understands the relationships between different types of content on your site, greatly improving the reading experience.
Over hundreds of years, typographers have developed a range of ratios between type sizes, many based on music. Calculating how these ratios play out across your headings can take a bit of math — or you can just use Tim Brown’s amazing Modular Scale, which automatically generates a classical type hierarchy from your base font size (body text) and a scale.
7. Tap into emotions with Emotypes
Your font choice plays a key role in the message you send and tone you set for your site. Emotype makes it easy to select fonts based on the emotions you want to convey on your website. Fonts are hand selected and sorted into four groups of emotions: confident, welcoming, unique, and neutral.
Go ahead, get into the font feels:
8. Map out font pairings with IDEO’s Font Map
It’s common for designers to fall back on age-old, reliable font pairings. However, original font pairings are becoming a surefire way to distinguish your site and brand.
IDEO Font Map started as an experiment in the world of fonts with machine learning and has evolved into a helpful tool for creating unusual and unique font pairings. IDEO’s Font Map, created by Kevin Ho, allows you to see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.
9. FontJoy
FontJoy, like IDEO’s Font Map, applies machine learning to font pairing. This tool specializes in finding contrasting yet complimentary typefaces to produce beautiful and unexpected combinations.
Whether you’re a design vet, newbie, or typography nerd, you’ll have fun playing around with headline, introduction, and body text font combinations.
There are so many amazing typography tools out there, we know we’re leaving out a ton. Tell us your favorite type tools in the comments below!
• A new tab for folder import of SVG images (batch import).
• Support for rectangles with rounded corners.
• Bug fixes related to ligature substitution in the kerning tab.
• Add the option to delete all kerning pairs in a font.
• Important bug fixes in the SVG parser.
• Add support for renaming glyphs (in the POST table).
• Add support for filtering glyps. You can keep a small subset and delete all other characters.
• Bug fixes.
• An additional format for single stroke CNC (engraving) fonts (same way back).
• Bug fixes and updates for older operating systems.
• Single stroke paths for CNC machines.
• Unicode 13
• Four letter vendor ID
• Bug fixes and speed optimizations
• Many improvements to the overview tab
• Better spacing classes. It makes to kerning and spacing of your fonts easier.
• Smaller file size for OTF fonts.
• Many improvements to the underlying engine and plenty of bugfixes in all parts of the program.
• Solve problems in OpenType-SVG fonts.
• Fix SVG folder import.
• Better tools for editing COLR paths.
• Better SVG parsing. Support for the “use” tag in the SVG parser.
• Speed optimizations.
• Bug fixes.
• Support for aalt, a new OTF tag for alternates. Illustrator uses this feature.
• Additional vertical guides.
Kinetic Typography software, free download
• Retain view and selected glyph when switching character set in the overview tab.
• Compare both monochrome and color glyph in the editing view.
• Make it possible to import a TTF or OTF glyph even if a Unicode value can't be found for it.
• Menu reorganization (view menu).
• Automatic backups.
• A new tab for creating ligatures.
• Edit COLR glyphs in Birdfont.
• Generate COLR fallback from SVG and vice versa.
• Support for a new color font format: COLR/CPAL.
• Visual feedback when fonts have been exported.
• Set a color as the forground color in COLR glyphs (the color will be selected by the user).
• Better strokes, use less points. Fix bevel and round line joins.
• Center glyphs vertically.
• Add stylistic set substitution, OTF tags ss01 – ss20.
• Enable comments in SVG file names for designers that imports all files in a folder.
• Add a customized character set to the overview tab.
• Center glyphs.
• Import and export large character sets in OTF fonts.
• Set width for all glyphs at the same time.
• Add support for adjusting line gap.
• Cut paths (Ctrl+X or Cmd+X).
• Fix OTF support (compatibility with After Effects).
• Support for adding new Unicode points.
• Show ligatures in search results.
• Bug fixes: grid, file dialog and special search terms in the Unicode Charater Database (UCD).
• Fixes for SVG files made with Illustrator.
• Theme color fixes.
• Fix resize tool.
• Customizable preview template (HTML).
• Speed optimizations of spacing classes.
• Bug fixes in OTF files on Mac.
Typography Software Free
• Better conversion from SVG to font.
• Round, bevel or miter line joins.
• Fix SVG import.
• OTF support, OpenType Fonts with PostScript outlines.
• A good number of bug fixes.
• New file extension: .birdfont replaces .bf. You can still open your font in older versions of the editor if you change the extention to .bf.
• Adjust underline thickness and position in a font.
• Run faster on Windows.
• Export large (CJK) fonts.
• Fix parsing of TTF fonts.
• Add support for input with Cyrillic keyboards and other character sets.
• Fix ligature encoding.
• Use native file dialog on Windows 10.
• Make sure fonts pass validation in Font Book.
• Fix stroke export.
• Fix parsing of CSS data in SVG files
• Updated Unicode Character Database (ucd)
• Fix Illustrator import
• Color font support for Edge
• Support for Arabic scripts
• Color fonts
• Better SVG import
• Larger number of kerning pairs is supported in the GPOS table (LookupType 9: Extension Positioning).
• HiDPI support on Windows and bugfixes.
• Change writing direction to RTL (right to left) in kerning tab
• Bug fixes
• New freehand tool
• Rotate objects and point handles with 45 degree steps
• Bug fixes
• Speed opimizations
• Improved vertical metrics in TTF fonts
• Sandbox support on Mac OS
• Bug fixes
• More descriptive fields in TTF fonts (license, designer, URL etc.)
• Stylistic alternates (OpenType feature tag: salt)
• Small Caps (OpenType feature tag: scmp)
• Capitals to Small Caps (OpenType feature tag: c2sc)
• Swashes (OpenType feature tag: swsh)
• Parse circles, ellipses and lines in SVG files
• Support for high resolution screens
• Lock grid and guides
• Merge overlapping regions
• Bug fixes in the TTF generator
• Layers
• Mac specific TTF fonts (fixes fontbook problems)
• Fallback font with support for many languages
• Faster GUI
• Speed optimization in font export
• Faster search queries in the Unicode Data Base
• Better parsing of SVG files generated with Illustrator
• Dialog for importing a folder with SVG files
• Stroke
• Round line caps
• Bug fixes