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991 Web-Safe Fonts You Can Use for Free on Your Author Website, in Social Media Graphics, and Elsewhere

Like book covers, choosing the right font for your website or your social media graphic can send a message and elicit an emotional response (this makes it more likely to be noticed, and re-shared!).  Also, if you are careful when choosing the font for the site title or author name, you can give visitors subtle clues about the genre.

At the same time, you probably want the font to be free to use under a Creative Commons license. I am fine with paying for font licenses, but I also use Canva to make most of my web graphics, and they charge you for premium fonts or to upload your own fonts. Also, one downside of using a paid font on your site is that most people won’t have a license and can’t see the cool fontwork.

This is why the 300+ cool fonts identified by Derek Murphy aren’t really that useful to me. Yes, they are cool, but I can’t use most of them for web design work or in blog and social media graphics, so they don’t do me much good.

Luckily I have another source.  I am in the middle of designing a horror author website at the moment, and this morning I was pulling together a list of font choices to offer my client when I decided to take a couple minutes and tip you to my source and the fonts I am thinking about using.

Have you heard about Google Fonts? This is a project Google started many years ago with the laudable goal of making the web more beautiful by giving web designers more font options. The Google Fonts catalog currently consists of 991 fonts, all of which are free to use, and in fact many website building tools such as Divi and Elementor already have the fonts built in (you just have to know where to look).

I am still looking for fonts to use on the website for a horror author, but I did find a few worth sharing.

Aladin, Aclonica, Lobster Two, or Almendra would make great fonts for the title of a fantasy author’s website, or for fantasy themed social media graphic. UnifrakturCook, Stoke, Piedra, Indie Flower, or Butcherman are fonts that just scream horror. And then there are fonts like Trade Wind that could work for either horror or fantasy.

And if you want an SF-themed font, Orbitron, Press Start 2P, Quantico, Unica One, Audiowide, or Julius Sans One are worth a look. (These fonts could also work for thriller.) And if you want romance, there are any number of script or handwriting fonts to choose from.

With 991 fonts to choose from, there are so many options that I bet I missed at least half of them. I plan to go back and build lists of genre-appropriate fonts, but for now I just wanted to bring this to your attention (also, I am hoping you might point out the fonts I missed).

One small caveat: I can’t guarantee that the tool you like to use will support these fonts. Canva, to name one example, only supports some Google Fonts, but not others. One possible way around this would be to find another free graphic design tool that lets you import fonts, and keep that other tool as a backup (MSPaint, for example).

When you do look for a font to use, and you find one you like, be sure to also check out the fonts that Google recommends as pairs for your chosen font. Some of the pair choices are generic, but others really work as complimentary font pairs.

Speaking of which, have you found a font you like?

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Comments


Sherelle Winters June 5, 2020 um 9:15 am

I love Google Fonts! I have the entire set installed on all my computers and use quite a few of them in my promotional materials, web site design, and book formatting. Some of my favorites include Great Vibes, Bad Script, and Playfair Display SC (I use the latter for my author names on all my covers).

We also use Roboto and Open Sans on almost all our web apps at work 🙂

Nate Hoffelder June 5, 2020 um 1:21 pm

It is nice to have the option, isn’t it?


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