When it comes to picking fonts and text, one great resource is Google Fonts. Google Fonts, if you'll notice over here is just an online free service where you can download, print and web safe fonts. If you'll notice so far, they've got 915 font families. It's not to say that they might get more, but these are all free to download to your computer depending on which operating system you have. If you'll notice over here in these categories on the right-hand side, we've got serif, sans serif, which we know serif is the font that has feet or little flourishes down at the bottom of the text. Sans serif for the ones that don't, like this font right here would be considered a sans serif font. Now display and handwriting fonts. Those are more of your decorative fonts. Then, you've also got monospace, which that is actually sans serif fonts that looks like a typewriter or other tech looking tight. Then if you'll notice down here, you could pick number of styles. Right now, I've got it set to all of them. Or, you can also pick thickness which that has to do with the weight of the font. If you notice, if I pick really thick, those are going to have some pretty thick different parts of the font even if you look at the dots in the eyes, they tend to get bigger. But then, if I go a little bit thinner, we're getting thinner and thinner weight of the texts. So this is like bold or condensed. It can also be what's called thin or thick type. Then, we've also got down here, if I want to go to slant. This will show me different types of font that just naturally slant. It's not necessarily italics because that's another thing that some of the slant families may have an italic version in it. Instead, it's ones that just tend to slant just naturally, and there's really not a way to get them to unslant. But, you can have one that's a medium slant. You can have a little bit less slanting to some of them if you don't like that too much of a slant, gets less and less, and then these over here are very slanted. Tend to look like handwriting almost. Then, you've also even got width of the font, which again, this goes with thickness because it deals with the weight of the font. You can tell all of these, these are just all the options. But, if I go to a little bit thinner, they get to be thinner different strokes on the font. But then, if I go move the little toggle, they're going to get thicker and thicker type things. So it depends on what you want as to which filters you want to pick over here. Now, if I want to hover over any of these boxes, notice these different little red stuff starts showing up. There's a couple things I want to go through here with some of these different drop-down menus here. First one is sentence. So this is obviously got it in a sentence, the font just showing up in a sentence which, for the most part probably has a lot of different types. Although, I only really notice one Y here for our descender. So I may want to go in and maybe see it in a paragraph. How would this look in a whole paragraph? This particular font, open sans. Can also look at just the alphabet itself, the entire alphabet that'll show it to me. Or I can even just isolate just the numbers because maybe I want to pick a certain type of font that I want the numbers to look a certain way, and also two, I can either push custom and just start typing a sentence. Sentence with words like me, sometimes, certain. When you type in certain formats, your fingers go faster than you do. But you can also, if you go up here to sentence up here, I can still start typing. If I like if I go, oh look, I don't have the G in there or I want to see, I've got an F but maybe I want to see what a D looks like with that ascender versus descender. Or I want to see what the Q looks like, that versus the P, how do those work? There's a couple of ways to literally just go in there and start typing. Now, this one over here, this middle one is really important because it will tell you what different versions within this font family, what are some different versions of that type you can choose from. So for instance, we've got light here. It's a little bit lighter. Got light italic. Just regular, regular italic. So if it says it has italic, then it will come with an italic spot in and of itself that designer has decided, this is the way they want it to be italicized not with the italics feature that most comes with most design programs or Word or things like that. They have literally decided how far they wanted to slant that way. You've also got semi bold, and then bold, and also bold italic. Extra bold, this will come with extra bold too. So there's lots of different options that this one can come with. Right now, we've got it set to 40 point but I can move it around to see how big it's going to get. Now, another thing I could do that'll show me some other things is maybe I want to, right now I've got all this font is just like most websites would be. Black font on a white background. But if you notice, there's this little paint bucket guy up here which is a really cool feature. Because what's to say, you don't want to go right now we've got it to white background. Or if you want to see what it looks like at black background. Black with white text, gives it a totally different field. You may lose some of the stuff that you wiped with that font when it goes to black. Does it start looking blurred together? Then, you can also even do blue and even yellow. I have not found a way to then go in and change the actual color of these fonts per say. But this gives you enough of a feel to know what it's going to look like in reversed out and also just regular, what you would see on most websites. Another thing that I've found interesting is this featured menu right here. Because if I click on it, there's a couple of different fonts in here that for some reason the people who put together Google fonts like these. Sound for instance, it's also going to tell you created it. This is that foundry, the type boundary or it can literally just be a specific design are listed there. I'm going to scroll down a little bit here, and these fonts, these featured ones tend to stay pretty regularly the same ones, but they may flip them out depending on different fonts that they've got. But, if you'll notice it says five fresh headline and body texts pairings. We've talked about those before of putting together a serif versus a sans serif font. They've actually already done it for you. If you notice over here, it says about this collection and it's telling you over here that they tend to think that Cormorant Garamond and Proza Libre would go together well. They also think Libre Franklin and Libre Baskerville would go together. Well, I think we actually put those together in one of our examples. Then, they've even got, if you keep going down here, they can tell you exactly who put the font together. Then, there's also two, you can go in here and start playing around with each of these fonts that they've got to see what's going to happen to it. You've got that red stuff you can go with. I just find this wouldn't be an interesting way to determine what type of headline and body texts parents tend to go together well. Like I said, you can then download any of these fonts to your computer and all of that depends on what type of computer you have. Whether it be a Mac or a PC, it also depends on the operating system. So that's going to vary depending on your own type of font that you want. But to download it, we just click on it and it says select this font. That is going to download it to my computer. I'm not going to take you through that because I have a Mac and some of you out there may have a PC but it will step you through the process and also too you can actually use Google to find out online where to put your fonts so that they will show up in different types of computer programs that you may use, that don't necessarily have some of these fonts. So again, Google Fonts, great place right now like I said they have 915 which that's at the head of that should get you started there of different font families that you can download for free that they have shown or have determined based on people who work at Google as well as these different types of people who have created some of these fonts. They have determined that these all the 915 fonts that they have listed here, and you can isolate them based on categories. If you pick it, any of these fonts, they should look fine on the web as well as print.
