The Art of Mixing Google Typefaces (Infographic)

Each and every time you start a design project; you’ll have thousands – if not millions – of different typefaces to choose from, many of which are available at absolutely no cost to yourself thanks to open-source font directories like Google Fonts.

While these open-source directories make our lives so much easier in some ways (e.g. by hosting the typefaces on their servers allowing us to include them in our projects with ease), they almost certainly make things harder in the sense that they give us such an abundance of choice.

A few years ago, the likes of Georgia, Helvetica, or Arial might have been perfectly acceptable font choices as they were the “best of a bad bunch”, but with the introduction of Google Fonts and other open-source directories, it’s now easy to spend hours sifting through thousands of typefaces, often procrastinating about which typeface best reflects the personality of the brand you’re working with.

And that’s just the beginning; once you’ve chosen a typeface, chances are that you’ll need to choose another, complimentary typeface to go with it.

The bottom-line: It’s never easy to make the right typography choices.

However, we stumbled across an infographic from the UK print company, FastPrint, which aims to make your life that little bit easier.

It shows twenty different typefaces from the Google Fonts directory, all of which have been painstakingly tried and tested against one another to create a colour-coded grid showing the compatibility of the resulting four hundred unique typeface combinations.

All you need to do to pick a winning font combination is pick a typeface, cross-reference it on the grid, and look out for a white square. If the square at the cross-reference point is either dark or light grey, it might be wise to start again, as these combinations are unlikely to work well in your project.

Here’s the infographic:

Please click on the image to enlarge