Tinker Tools

Font Pair Preview Live

Preview Google Font pairings with live text rendering. Find the perfect heading and body font combination for your next project. Free and open-source fonts ready to use.

Preview

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, as well as adjusting the space between pairs of letters.
Heading: Playfair Display at 36px
Body: Source Sans 3 at 16px

Type Scale

H1The quick brown fox36px
H2The quick brown fox27px
H3The quick brown fox22px
BodyThe quick brown fox16px
SmallThe quick brown fox14px

Code

HTML Embed
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Playfair+Display:wght@300;400;500;600;700;800;900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Source+Sans+3:wght@300;400;500;600;700;800;900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
CSS
/* Heading */
font-family: 'Playfair Display', serif;

/* Body */
font-family: 'Source Sans 3', sans-serif;

How it works

1. Choose Fonts

Select a heading font and a body font from 20+ curated Google Fonts. Use the preset pairings for quick, designer-approved combinations.

20+ Fonts

2. Preview Live

See your selected fonts rendered in a realistic preview card with heading, body text, and adjustable font sizes. Edit the sample text to test with your actual content.

Real-Time Preview

3. Use in Your Project

Copy the Google Fonts embed link and CSS declarations directly. Drop them into your HTML and stylesheet to start using the pairing immediately.

Ready to Use

What is Font Pairing?

Font pairing is the practice of selecting two or more typefaces that work well together in a design. The most common pattern is combining a heading font with a body font — where the heading font provides visual impact and personality, while the body font prioritizes readability at smaller sizes. Good pairings create visual hierarchy without clashing. Bad pairings make text feel disjointed or force the reader to work harder than necessary.

The principle behind font pairing is contrast with harmony. You want enough difference between the fonts that each serves a distinct purpose (heading vs. body, display vs. reading), but enough shared characteristics that they feel like they belong to the same design system. A classic approach is pairing a serif heading font (like Playfair Display) with a sans-serif body font (like Source Sans 3). The serif adds elegance and anchors the heading, while the sans-serif keeps body text clean and scannable on screens.

Google Fonts makes font pairing accessible to everyone by offering 1,500+ open-source typefaces at no cost. Each font is served from Google's CDN with optimal caching, WOFF2 compression, and unicode-range subsetting. This means you can experiment freely without worrying about licensing fees or performance penalties. The fonts load only the character sets your page actually uses, keeping payload sizes minimal even when using two or three different families.

Key Features and Benefits

  • Curated Font Selection — Instead of overwhelming you with 1,500+ options, this tool focuses on 20+ carefully selected fonts that pair well across multiple combinations. The list includes popular sans-serif fonts (Inter, Roboto, Poppins), elegant serifs (Playfair Display, Merriweather), and geometric typefaces (Space Grotesk, Montserrat) — covering the most common design needs.
  • Live Preview with Editable Text — See exactly how your font pairing looks with real text, not generic samples. The preview card lets you type your own headlines and paragraphs, so you can test how the fonts handle your actual content — including long words, special characters, and different paragraph lengths.
  • Preset Pairings from Designers — Not sure where to start? Click any of the suggested pairing chips to instantly load a designer-approved combination. Each preset is labeled with its style (Elegant Editorial, Bold & Clean, Developer Favorite) so you can quickly find pairings that match your project's tone.
  • Adjustable Font Sizes — Use the sliders to adjust heading and body font sizes independently. This lets you test readability at different scales — from large hero headings at 72px down to compact body text at 12px. The type scale preview shows how H1, H2, H3, body, and small text look proportionally.
  • Ready-to-Use Code Snippets — The tool generates the HTML embed link and CSS font-family declarations for your selected pairing. Copy these directly into your project — no need to look up the correct Google Fonts URL format or remember which fonts are serif vs. sans-serif for the fallback stack.
  • Dynamic Font Loading — Fonts are loaded on demand from Google Fonts. When you select a new font, the tool creates a stylesheet link element that fetches the font files. Already-loaded fonts are cached, so switching back to a previously used font is instant. The browser's HTTP cache also persists fonts across page reloads.

How to Preview Font Pairings

  1. 1

    Select a Heading Font

    Use the Heading Font dropdown to choose a typeface for your headings and titles. Display fonts and bold serifs work well here because they need to be impactful at large sizes. The font loads from Google Fonts automatically when selected.

  2. 2

    Select a Body Font

    Use the Body Font dropdown to choose a typeface for paragraph text. Prioritize legibility — sans-serif fonts like Inter, Roboto, and Source Sans 3 are popular choices for body text because their clean letterforms remain readable at 14-16px on screens.

  3. 3

    Adjust Sizes and Preview

    Use the font size sliders to set your heading and body sizes. The preview card updates in real time. Edit the sample text by clicking on it and typing your own content. The type scale section below shows proportional heading sizes (H1, H2, H3) automatically calculated from your heading size.

  4. 4

    Try Preset Pairings

    Click any of the suggested pairing chips to instantly apply a curated combination. Each preset is designed by typographers and tested for readability and visual harmony. Use these as starting points, then customize the sizes to fit your layout.

  5. 5

    Copy the Code

    Once you are happy with the pairing, copy the HTML embed code and CSS font-family declarations from the code section. Paste the link tag into your HTML head and the font-family rules into your stylesheet. The fonts will load automatically from Google's CDN.

Expert Tips for Typography in Web Design

Limit your design to two fonts maximum — one for headings and one for body text. Adding a third font is almost never necessary and usually makes the design feel cluttered. If you need visual variation, use different weights (regular, medium, bold) and sizes within the same font family. A single well-chosen typeface with 6 weights gives you more flexibility than three different typefaces.

Pay attention to x-height when pairing fonts. The x-height is the height of lowercase letters (like 'x', 'a', 'o'). Fonts with similar x-heights look more harmonious together even if their overall styles differ. For example, Lato and Merriweather have compatible x-heights, which is why they pair well despite one being sans-serif and the other serif. Mismatched x-heights create an awkward visual rhythm.

Always test your font pairing at the actual sizes you will use in production. A font that looks great at 48px in a preview might be unreadable at 14px in body text. Conversely, a font designed for body text might look bland and weak at heading sizes. This tool lets you adjust sizes, but do a final check in your actual layout with real content before committing to a pairing.

Consider font loading performance. Each Google Font adds an HTTP request and potentially 20-50KB of WOFF2 data. Two fonts with multiple weights can add 100-200KB to your page. Use font-display: swap (which Google Fonts does by default) to avoid invisible text during loading. If performance is critical, consider subsetting fonts to only the characters you need, or using system font stacks for body text and a web font only for headings.

Related Tools

Color Contrast Checker

Typography and color are inseparable in web design. After choosing your font pairing, check that your text color has sufficient contrast against its background. WCAG 2.1 requires a minimum 4.5:1 ratio for body text and 3:1 for large headings. The contrast checker validates this instantly.

Gradient Generator

Gradient backgrounds can enhance or undermine typography. Use the gradient generator to create CSS gradients that complement your font pairing. Test readability by previewing your heading font over the gradient — ensure there is enough contrast across the entire gradient range.

CSS Minifier

Once you have finalized your font pairing and written the CSS, minify your stylesheet to reduce file size. The CSS minifier strips comments, whitespace, and redundant rules. Combined with efficient font loading, this keeps your typography-heavy pages fast.

These tools form a complete typography workflow for web designers. Choose your font pairing here, verify color contrast for accessibility, create complementary gradient backgrounds, and optimize your final CSS for production. Good typography is not just about fonts — it is about the entire visual system working together.

Frequently Asked Questions

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