Overused fonts in web design, and how to choose past them
A handful of free typefaces, a few clean sans faces and one or two high-contrast display serifs, now appear on so many sites that they carry no identity of their own. They're not bad fonts. The problem is that they've become defaults, and a default can't tell a visitor anything about the business using it.
The usual suspects
Look through a few dozen recent startup pages or AI-built sites and the same names repeat. Among the sans faces: Inter, Poppins, Montserrat, Roboto, Open Sans, DM Sans and Space Grotesk. For a touch of elegance, the same high-contrast display serifs, Playfair Display most often, set above a sans body. For anything technical, a monospaced face used for labels whether or not anything on the page is code.
Several of these are excellent pieces of work. Inter was drawn for screens and holds up at tiny interface sizes; Roboto and Open Sans read well in long text. What overuse takes away isn't quality but signal. When a typeface appears on a bank, a meditation app, a bakery and a developer tool, seeing it tells the reader nothing, and the page has to do all its talking through words and pictures.
How defaults become defaults
- They're free and one click away. Open-licensed families on Google Fonts are the path of least resistance for anyone building quickly.
- Templates and UI kits ship with them. A starter theme or component library picks a safe face once, and every project built on it inherits that choice.
- They look good in a thumbnail. Clean geometric shapes photograph well in showcase shots, so the shots get copied.
- AI models learned from those pages. A model asked for a modern site reaches for what it saw most often. The more sites use a face, the more generated sites use it, and the loop tightens.
The result is a recognisable look, and it is the real cost of overused fonts in web design: readers may not be able to name the font, but they register that a page feels like a template, and that feeling lowers trust in everything else on it.
A method for choosing past them
- Describe the voice first. Three adjectives for how the business should sound. A joinery workshop might be "exact, warm, unfussy".
- Name the category of face that fits. Humanist sans for warmth, grotesque for plainness, geometric for order, rounded for friendliness, condensed for impact.
- List candidates from that category, then cross off the most common. If a face is the first result everywhere, skip it unless you have a specific reason.
- Check the practical needs. Weights, italics, numerals, accents, licence and file size, exactly as you would for any face.
- Test at body size on a phone with your own copy before you commit.
The aim isn't novelty for its own sake. An obscure display face with poor spacing is worse than a well-made common one. You're looking for a well-drawn family that isn't the reflex choice, and that suits the voice you wrote down. How to choose a font for a website walks through the testing step in detail.
When a common font is still the right call
Some jobs want neutrality. Dense dashboards, internal tools and documentation are read for content, and a familiar, well-hinted face lets the data speak. A system font stack, which uses whatever face the device already has, loads instantly and looks native. If you choose a common font for one of those reasons, give the page its character elsewhere: in the colour, the layout grid, the photography or the writing.
What Anticode checks
Anticode's Critic runs a check aimed squarely at this habit: it flags the handful of fonts nearly every AI-built site picks. It runs alongside a one-family check, since mixing two or three unrelated faces is the other common way generated pages look unplanned.
Since 23 October 2026 the design gate also blocks publishing pages that use serif fallbacks or a third font family. That rules out the familiar move of a decorative serif headline over a sans body with a monospaced label face on top. Each of the seven design systems commits to one face instead: Geist, IBM Plex Sans, Jost, Fredoka, Archivo, Figtree and Inter Tight. In fairness, Inter Tight is a close, tighter-spaced relative of Inter, chosen for the Swiss system because a strict grid wants a neutral face; the grid, the single red and the numbered sections carry its identity.
Questions people ask
Is Inter overused?
It's one of the most common faces on new sites, generated ones especially, so it rarely adds identity. It remains a strong choice for dense interfaces, where neutrality is the point.
Why do AI website builders all use the same fonts?
Models reproduce what appears most often in the pages they learned from, and those pages lean on a few free, popular families. Without a design system or a check, the most common face wins.
Does using a popular font hurt SEO?
No. Search engines don't rank by typeface. The cost is in how the page reads to people: generic type makes a business harder to remember.
What's a good alternative to Poppins or Montserrat?
Start from why you wanted them, usually a clean geometric feel, and look at other geometric or rounded families with good body-size spacing. Test each one with your own copy on a phone.