Like many things in Google’s library of services and apps products, the Fonts page is getting a material design makeover that brings the style of the user interface up to date with the majority of their other offerings that have material design currently. If you’re new to Google Fonts, this might be the perfect time to jump in and see what the buzz has been about since it launched. The big draw is obviously the visual prowess as the new look really takes things up to a new level, but the best part about the layout for site visitors is the way everything works.
The page is more interactive than it was before and everything is easy to use. You can view every single open source font that Google has listed on site from the directory tab, which currently includes a total of 804 font families, and a quick click on the featured tab shifts things over to a collection of featured fonts with large thumbnails. You can even change the color of the page backdrop so you can see what different fonts look like layered on top of different page colors, and as you would expect Google has piled on plenty of animation that follow the clicks of various elements.
Back on the directory tab, you can play with different elements like font size and the demo text that shows what the font looks like, which can be switched between sentence, paragraph, and more, and if you’d prefer to see the font with a different set of words you can type up whatever you want right on the screen. The font size is easy to swap out with a little slider bar that you can drag from left to right to make the font bigger or smaller, and you can even change the font between regular, bold, italic, light, and more. If you want to change the language and the sorting of the fonts to narrow down your browsing results you can do so from the side bar that sits at the right of the page, and clicking on each individual font selection will give you various details about it like where that font is most popular and how many times it’s been used over the past week.