Using Web Fonts

This guide covers how to add web fonts to your Gatsby site.

Web fonts and Gatsby

Web fonts provide a variety of typography styling options for your site. Hosting your fonts within a Gatsby project increases your site’s speed by up to ~300 milliseconds on desktop and 1+ seconds on 3G connections.

Prerequisites

This guide uses the Gatsby default starter.

Adding web fonts

Some examples of web font services include Google Fonts and Typekit Web Fonts.

Using Google Fonts

The fastest way to get started using Google Fonts is by choosing a font from Fontsource.

This example shows how to set up the Open Sans font. If you have a different Google Font you want to use, you can find the corresponding package in NPM or the packages directory in the Fontsource repository.

  1. Run npm install fontsource-open-sans to download the necessary package files.

  2. Then within your app entry file or site component, import the font package. It is recommended you import it via the layout template (layout.js). However, importing via page component (index.js), or gatsby-browser.js are viable alternatives.

If you wish to select a particular weight or style, you may specify it by changing the import path.

Note: The range of supported weights and styles a font may support is shown in each package’s README file.

  1. Once it’s imported, you can reference the font name in a CSS stylesheet, CSS Module, or CSS-in-JS.

Using Typekit Web Fonts

You can add Typekit Web Fonts to your project by using the gatsby-plugin-web-font-loader and your Adobe Fonts project id. For example, this is how you can add Futura to your project.

First, install the Gatsby plugin with npm:

Or with yarn:

Then, create an environment variable to store your Adobe Fonts project ID. (Make sure this file is in your .gitignore file so your ID doesn’t get committed!) For example, if your Adobe Fonts project ID is abcdefg, your .env file will look like this:

Now you can add the gatsby-plugin-web-font-loader plugin to your gatsby-config.js file, located in your root directory. In your plugin configuration, pass in the environment variable you created.

Next, add the typeface name to the appropriate font-family value in your CSS.

Other resources

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