A Google font pairing tool that shows the fonts doing real work
Typebed is a free Google font pairing tool. Pick a display family and a UI family, and it
sets both into a working product interface: a nav bar, a marketing hero with a stat row, a
three-tier pricing table, and a signup form with labels, helper text, an error state, and
a disabled button. No account, no install, no API key.
Most pairing tools stop at a big headline over a paragraph of filler. That view flatters
almost everything. A typeface only shows its problems once it has to do small, dense,
unglamorous work: a 13px form label, a button caption, the fine print under a trial CTA,
numerals in a pricing card. Plenty of pairs that look sharp as a specimen go soft at that
size, and you tend to find out after the fonts are already wired into a real codebase.
How the readability score works
Every pairing gets a score out of 100 with its reasoning shown. Text contrast is the WCAG
2.x ratio of the preview's text against its background, and it carries 40% of the weight
because it is the only factor with an objective pass or fail. Body legibility is the UI
font's x-height divided by its cap-height, measured from the glyphs your browser actually
rasterized rather than read from a lookup table. Pairing contrast measures how far the two
faces diverge. Two defects can cap the score: text that fails WCAG, and the same family in
both slots. The other factors steer the number and explain themselves in the breakdown,
but they never veto it, because a measurement cannot see a typeface's skeleton.
Questions
- Is Typebed a font pairing generator?
-
No, and that is deliberate. A font pairing generator picks combinations for you, usually
from a curated shortlist. Typebed does the opposite: you bring a pairing you are already
considering and it shows you how that pairing holds up under real interface load, then
scores it. It works across all 112 families in the catalog, not a hand-picked set of
known-good answers.
- What are the best font combinations for a website?
-
It depends on how dense the interface is, which is the reason to test one rather than
take a list's word for it. For reference, these are the numbers Typebed gives: Bebas
Neue with Work Sans reaches 100, Fraunces with Inter scores 90, and Oswald with Inter
scores 78. Roboto with Open Sans scores 72 and gets flagged as too alike, because both
are humanist sans faces at similar widths, so the hierarchy between heading and body
goes soft.
- Do I need a Google Fonts API key?
-
No. Faces load from the keyless Google Fonts CSS2 CDN. There is no backend, no database,
and no account, so nothing about your pairing leaves the browser.
- Can I share a pairing?
-
Yes. Both fonts and the light or dark preview state encode into the URL, so copying the
address bar shares the exact pairing. You can also save pairings to the browser, and
they survive a reload and stay in sync across tabs.
- Does it work on a phone?
-
Yes. The layout reflows from 1440px down to 320px, and the mock scrolls through nav,
hero, pricing, and form.