Summary: According to our fonts study, designers of the best startups don’t use the trendy, cool fonts (surprise). Instead, they rely on old good system fonts, some of the popular Google Fonts, and they misspell font names a lot.
Check the font service on Product Hunt and join the discussion
“What’s your favorite font face?” — she asked after the second glass.
That was a tough question.
Segoe UI? Uncool.
Comic Sans? OK, you tried to be funny at least.
Helvetica Neue? It lacks personality.
Which fonts are cool fonts? Which fonts do people use after all? In particular, which fonts do successful teams use?
So we performed a study.
For best startups, we chose those which won on ProductHunt. We took it over multiple years.
We scraped the CSS from these websites and checked the font-face attributes.
This way we’ve got:
We’ve got thousands of fonts in the study.
Let’s limit our analysis to:
Here’s what we get.
We hoped to find the combinations of the fonts that trend in each particular year. Instead, we’ve found that there are few trends. In fact, people remain using the same fonts over and over again for years, if not centuries.
New projects still use the fonts for icons in 2018 (how to convert the icons to the fonts — better don’t though).
While we proposed a number of better solutions, they’re not close to our Line Awesome library. Is it the purpose? Replacing one icon font with another icon font.
At first, we tried to locate all fonts in 3 font libraries:
Of 500 unique fonts that we scraped, only 126 had matches in any of three libraries. Of the remaining 374, misspelled words are the majority.
Examples of the misspelled fonts:
People don’t look like their Instagram shots. True.
People are not as happy as their Facebook profiles are trying to convince us. True.
And designers don’t use all that trendy font combinations. True. We love this guide from Great Simple. Our study shows people only like it.
“Whatever Chrome shows for sans-serif, I like it”, — I can say.
About the author: Ivan Braun, UX designer, founder of Icons8
Check the font service on Product Hunt and let us know what you think
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