Merriweather

Eben Sorkin's thesis piece: a serif built for on-screen text. Tall x-height, wide apertures, serifs exaggerated yet blunt, every letter alive to the pixel - solid from 14 px. Four uprights plus italics, the near-default article serif of the blog era; the 2016 revision tidied its spacing. Headlines turn stocky and conservative, so trade up to Playfair for posters; its stacks with Open Sans or Lato bodies are content-web gold standards.

Sorkin's 2016 overhaul slimmed the bulging serifs and smoothed weight jumps (Merriweather Sans arrived too). For blogs: serif body + Merriweather Sans chrome is an in-family safe. No true variable build - list weights explicitly in the Google Fonts URL.

Print notes: the author once floated Light-as-text, but the standard is 400 body, 900 pull-quotes; its x-height peaks at 15-16 px and below that you should retreat to sans. For bilingual layouts it matches Source Han Serif's weight cadence at equal settings; when serving from Google Fonts, request the extended subset so diacritics never drop out.

Blogs and news body, knowledge bases, email templates. Picks: 400 text, 700 subheads, 1.6-1.75 leading.

Licence：SIL Open Font License 1.1

The dominant permissive licence for open fonts: free commercial use, modification, embedding and redistribution. Its core duties are that derivatives stay under OFL without the Reserved Font Name, the licence text travels with the files, and the fonts themselves are never sold standalone. Works typeset with them belong wholly to you.

Standard OFL 1.1 duties.