Design Resources
2 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars — scroll down for our analysis.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Language | License | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Inter The Inter font family for UI | 19.4k | +16/wk | Python | SIL Open Font License 1.1 | 77 |
| 7.3k | +2/wk | CSS | MIT | 73 |
Our Analysis
If you're building a web app or UI and need a font that's designed specifically for screens — Inter is that font. It's optimized for legibility at small sizes on computer screens, with features like tabular numbers, contextual alternates, and a massive character set covering 100+ languages. 19K stars, growing at +16/week, SIL Open Font License (fully free for everything). Created by Rasmus Andersson (former Spotify designer). The font family includes weights from Thin to Black with matching italics. Variable font version available for fine-grained weight control. Fully free. Use it in any project — commercial, open source, personal. No attribution required. Available on Google Fonts, npm via Fontsource, or direct download. Inter is everywhere. GitHub uses it. Figma uses it. Thousands of web apps use it. It's become the default "safe, good" UI font choice — and that's both its strength and the only real criticism. The catch: Inter is so widely used that it can make your app look like every other modern web app. If you want your product to have a distinct typographic identity, Inter won't give you that — it's designed to be invisible and functional, not distinctive. For dashboards, admin panels, and developer tools, that's exactly right. For a brand that needs personality, consider something with more character.
If you're picking fonts for a website and want to see what free Google Fonts actually look like in real typography — not just a specimen sheet — Beautiful Web Type shows you. It's a curated gallery of the best open source typefaces with real typographic layouts: pairings, sizing, spacing, the stuff that matters when you're actually designing a page. 7.3K stars, MIT license, CSS-based. The site showcases roughly 40 hand-picked typefaces from Google Fonts with beautiful specimen pages. Each font gets a real design layout, not just "The quick brown fox" in different sizes. It shows you how a font breathes in context. Fully free. It's a static website and a curated list. No paid tier, no service. The fonts featured are all free via Google Fonts. This is a reference tool, not something you install. Bookmark it. Open it when you're choosing fonts. Use it alongside Google Fonts' own interface to make better typographic decisions. The catch: the collection is small and curated, which is both the point and the limitation. If you need comprehensive coverage of all 1,500+ Google Fonts, this isn't it. And the project hasn't been updated frequently — some newer excellent typefaces aren't represented. It's a snapshot of good taste, not a living catalog.