About · TypeCraft

What this project is

TypeCraft is a free, browseable directory of every open-source typeface in the Google Fonts catalog. The site exists for one reason: choosing a typeface is one of the most consequential decisions in any visual design project, and the existing tools for browsing the open-source font landscape do a poor job of helping designers actually decide. Most directories present an undifferentiated grid of thumbnails, no honest information about what each face is good at, and no real filtering by intent. TypeCraft tries to be a different kind of directory — one that respects the time of the designer doing the choosing.

How we organise the catalog

Every font in TypeCraft is filed three ways. By category follows the classical typographic divisions: serif, sans-serif, display, handwriting, and monospace. By use case sorts the catalog by the job a typeface is being asked to do — headings, body text, display, monospace. And the full A–Z list lets you scroll the whole catalog, paginated. Search lets you jump directly to a family by name, designer, or category.

Every font page is a complete, server-rendered HTML document with metadata (designer, license, weights, supported writing systems, date of release), a live specimen rendered with the actual typeface, and a hand-authored description that explains where the design came from and what it is good at. Nothing on the site requires JavaScript to render — the catalog stays accessible to screen readers, search crawlers, archival tools, and designers on slow connections.

Where the data comes from

Font metadata in TypeCraft is sourced directly from the publicly accessible Google Fonts open-source catalog. The exact source used by the most recent build is documented in the project README. We mirror only the metadata — the actual font files are served by Google’s own CDN, and the download buttons on each font page link directly to the official Google Fonts source. We do not host the binary font files ourselves and we do not modify them in any way.

How the site is built

TypeCraft is a deliberately old-fashioned PHP application. Every URL on the site maps to a real PHP template that runs server-side, queries the local data store, and returns a complete HTML document. There is no client-side router, no single-page application, no JavaScript framework, and no build step. The entire site can be deployed by copying the source files to any host that runs PHP 8 or later. We made this choice on purpose: server-rendered HTML is faster, more accessible, easier to crawl, and dramatically cheaper to host than a comparable JavaScript SPA.

Licensing and use

Every typeface in the TypeCraft catalog is distributed under a permissive open-source license — almost always the SIL Open Font License, the Apache License 2.0, or the Ubuntu Font License. That means you can use these fonts in commercial projects, embed them in apps you sell, ship them with software you distribute, and modify them to suit your needs, provided you respect the lightweight attribution and redistribution terms documented on the licensing page. We are not lawyers and the contents of TypeCraft are not legal advice — when in doubt, read the license file that ships with the typeface itself.

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