Spruce Up Your Style: Using Roboto Font with CSS

3 min readMay 16, 2024

Roboto, a clean and versatile sans-serif typeface developed by Google, has become a popular choice for web design. Its crisp lines and balanced proportions make it ideal for both headings and body text, offering a professional and modern look to your website.

There are two main approaches to incorporating Roboto font into your CSS:

Self-Hosting the Font Files: This method gives you more control over the font files, but requires storing them on your own server and managing their delivery.
Using Google Fonts: This is a convenient and efficient way to use Roboto, as Google handles the font hosting and delivery through a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

1. Self-Hosting Roboto Fonts

Here’s how to set up Roboto using self-hosted font files:

Download Roboto Fonts: Head over to [Roboto font download] and choose the desired weights (e.g., regular, bold, italic) you want to use on your website.
Place the Font Files: Upload the downloaded font files (typically .woff or .ttf) to a directory on your web server.

The CSS Code:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Roboto';
  src: url('path/to/Roboto-Regular.woff') format('woff'),
       url('path/to/Roboto-Regular.ttf') format('truetype');
  font-weight: 400; /* Regular weight */
}
.my-element {
  font-family: 'Roboto', sans-serif; /* Specify Roboto first, fallback to sans-serif */
}

Explanation:

@font-face rule: This rule defines a new font family for your CSS.
font-family: Set the name of the font family as 'Roboto'.
src: Specify the location of the font files using url and format.
Replace path/to/ with the actual directory path where you uploaded the fonts.
font-weight: Define the weight of the font (e.g., 400 for regular, 700 for bold).

Applying the Font:

In your CSS, use the font-family property within selectors to apply Roboto to specific elements.
In the example, the .my-element class will use Roboto as the primary font, with "sans-serif" as a fallback for browsers that don't recognize Roboto.

Pros:

More control over font files.

Cons:

Requires managing font files on your server.
May introduce performance overhead if fonts are not optimized.

2. Using Roboto Fonts from Google Fonts

This method is simpler and more efficient:

Visit Google Fonts: Go to [Google Fonts] and search for “Roboto”.
Select Font Variants: Choose the specific weights and styles (e.g., regular, italic, bold) you want to use.
Generate Code: Click “Select styles” and then “Embed” to generate the HTML and CSS code snippet.

The Generated Code (Example):

HTML

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,700italic,400italic,700" rel="stylesheet">