Random Font Generator

Type a word or a line, set how many cards you want (1 to 10), and press Generate Font. Each card shows your text at 20px in a randomly picked font family and weight drawn from a list of 162 typefaces. The copy button copies the text as rich text, so pasting into Google Docs, Word, Keynote or an email keeps the font and weight; paste into a plain text field and you get the words only.

The tool is a way to see a headline or a name in several faces at once without opening a design app. The font name isn't printed on the card, which is a limitation to know about up front: to find out what you're looking at, copy the card and paste it into a document, where the toolbar shows the family and weight.

What's in the font list

The 162 families fall into two groups. The first is system fonts that ship with Windows, macOS or both: Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma, Calibri, Garamond, Futura, Century Gothic, Trebuchet MS, Impact, Comic Sans MS, Palatino, Book Antiqua, Baskerville, Rockwell, Copperplate, Consolas, Monaco, Brush Script MT, Papyrus, Optima, Candara, Segoe UI, Segoe Script and the Lucida family. The second is open-source web fonts from the Google Fonts library: Merriweather, Playfair Display, Lora, EB Garamond, Libre Baskerville, Crimson Text, Spectral, Abril Fatface, Karla, Jost, Space Grotesk, IBM Plex Serif and Mono, PT Serif and Mono, Barlow Condensed, Rajdhani, Saira, Archivo Black and others.

How a card renders depends on your device. A font only shows as itself if it is installed on your computer or phone. This page loads three web fonts of its own (Lexend Deca, Poppins and Lato), but it doesn't download the rest of the Google Fonts list, so a card assigned Playfair Display will render in Playfair only if you have it installed, and in your browser's default serif or sans-serif otherwise. On a Mac with Office installed most of the system group renders correctly; on a phone, fewer do. Weights are drawn from the standard CSS range (100 to 900, plus normal, bold, lighter and bolder), and a family that lacks the requested weight is synthesized or snapped to the nearest one by the browser.

Using the cards

• Shortlisting a headline face. Type the headline, generate ten, and screenshot the two you like. Then copy those two into a doc to learn their names.
• Logo and wordmark sketches. A company or band name in ten faces is a quick first pass before you buy or license anything. Pair it with the Random Symbol Generator if you want a mark to go with the letters.
• Teaching typography. The same sentence in a slab serif, a humanist sans and a script makes the classification lesson concrete. Because names aren't shown, students have to identify the class from the letterforms.
• Styled text for social posts. Some platforms accept pasted rich text; most don't. For text that looks different anywhere, the Random Unicode Generator and the Pls Donate Text Generator produce Unicode lookalike characters that survive in a plain-text field.

Reading a font you can't name

If you'd rather identify a card by eye, a few tells cover most of the list. Serifs with high contrast between thick and thin strokes and a vertical stress are Didone or transitional (Playfair Display, Abril Fatface, Baskerville); old-style serifs have lower contrast and a diagonal stress on the "o" (Garamond, EB Garamond, Crimson Text). Slab serifs have thick, squared-off serifs (Rockwell, Bree Serif). Geometric sans faces build letters from circles and straight lines (Futura, Century Gothic, Jost); humanist sans faces look more like handwriting (Verdana, Lucida Sans, Karla); grotesques are the neutral ones (Helvetica, Arial, Space Grotesk). Monospace faces give every character the same width (Courier New, Consolas, IBM Plex Mono). Scripts and display faces (Brush Script MT, Segoe Script, Papyrus) announce themselves. For a plain-text alternative to fancy styling, the ASCII Art Generator draws large letters out of characters instead. More text and symbol tools are under all word & language generators.