Fonts for video

How the kit chooses type, which Google Fonts work for video and why, and the eleven ready pairings. To just pick one, jump to The pairings.

Checked against Google Fonts on 2026-10-10: 60 families, each requested with the weights listed here, and every pairing requested as one stylesheet.

Why video type is not web type

A web page is read up close, at the reader's own pace. A video is read once, for as long as the editor allows, often on a phone held at arm's length and often with the sound off. That changes what a font must do.

So the kit uses three roles, never more:

What the check found

Three things that would otherwise go wrong in a render:

1. Some families have one weight only. Bebas Neue, Anton, DM Serif Display and Instrument Serif exist in 400 alone. A title set in "800" of such a face is drawn by the browser as a faked bold, which looks smeared.
2. Google leaves a family out without a word. Ask for a stylesheet with Inter and with Bebas Neue in weights 500 to 800, and Google answers "ok" with Inter only. The title then falls back to a system font and nothing reports an error. The kit now asks only for weights a family has, and before a render it checks that the stylesheet really gives every family.
3. Not every face goes to 800. Space Grotesk, Instrument Sans, Oswald, Quicksand, Fredoka, Lora and DM Sans stop at 700. Lato has 400 and 700 and nothing between. DM Mono has no bold.

Each pairing below therefore carries its own title weight and its own tracking.

How titles are set

Captions are never tracked tight. They are 500 weight, at most two balanced lines.

The pairings

Set one with "style": { "fontPreset": "technical" }.

How they were chosen

• One voice, two registers. In every pairing the display and text faces share a build (both grotesque, or a serif over a humanist sans), so the card and the caption feel like one design. Two unrelated faces look like two videos.
• Text faces are the safe ones. Inter, DM Sans, IBM Plex Sans, Source Sans 3, Work Sans, Nunito Sans, Public Sans and Geist all have the four weights captions and labels use, and all stay clear at caption size after encoding.
• A serif is used only for display. Captions in a serif lose their thin strokes to compression on a phone.
• Mono follows the family where it can. IBM Plex Mono with IBM Plex Sans, Geist Mono with Geist, DM Mono with DM Sans.

Faces left out, and why

Using your own

{ "style": { "fonts": { "display": "Poppins", "text": "Roboto" } } }

Any face of a pairing can be replaced, and any Google Fonts family can be named.

• A family in the kit's table is asked for in exactly the weights it has, and its titles are set by its kind (see the table above).
• A family the kit does not know is asked for in the weights its role uses. Before the render, the kit checks the stylesheet; a family Google left out is asked for again in its regular weight, and a family Google does not have stops the run with its name.
• For a font that is not on Google Fonts, install it on the machine and set "fontSource": "installed".

The product's own font

When the product has been explored (showcase explore), its own font is used for captions and labels, as long as it is on Google Fonts and you have not chosen fonts yourself. Captions drawn over the product then look like part of it. Titles keep the display face of the pairing. showcase make prints a note when it does this, and "style": { "match": false } turns it off.

The full table

All 60 families the kit knows, with the weights it will ask for.

The table lives in src/brief/fonts.ts with the date it was checked. Google adds and changes families; check again before relying on a weight that is not listed.

All of these are free to use in video under the SIL Open Font License or Apache License, as Google Fonts publishes them.