Every online project needs the right typeface, but sometimes we don't know what we want until we see it. So how can we view hundreds of typefaces at once without downloading them or visiting shady sites? An excellent solution is "The Anatomy of a Thousand Typefaces", a web app with more than 800 specimens to study up close.
Last year we discussed a recurring problem on websites and mobile apps: text that is too light to read. Some companies' parameters are truly ridiculous, and besides their harmful brightness and contrast settings, their choice of typefaces also plays against them. If you're preparing an online project and don't want a similar issue, the best approach is to choose your typefaces in advance and experiment with them until the result is satisfactory.
That brings us to "The Anatomy of a Thousand Typefaces", a web app with more than 800 entries presenting an impressive variety of styles. The basic tags allow filtering by essential characteristics (monospace, serif, etc.), but if you need more precision, advanced filters enable searching by contrast, weight, width, and height. If you find something interesting, clicking it shows the complete character set, a small sample of text at different sizes, and secondary technical information.
Now that we have a preferred typeface, the question is, how do we download it? The answer is simple: we can't, or at least not with this web app. The process is reduced to entering the typeface name into Google, and with a bit of luck, it will be free and accessible. Don't worry, the odds are very good. All the searches I conducted returned free fonts under very permissive licenses.
