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About this tool
Seventies and eighties font pairs with matching palettes and live WCAG contrast ratios for every text and accent colour.
Retro Vibe Font Pairing combines a seventies or eighties display face from Google Fonts with a readable text face, and ships each pair with a period palette that is scored live against the WCAG 2.1 contrast formula. Every colour is stored as HSL so you can shift text and accent lightness and watch the contrast ratio move, with the 4.5:1 AA threshold for normal text and 3:1 for large text applied automatically by size. Useful when a nostalgic palette needs to survive an accessibility review.
Open Retro Vibe Font Pairing on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Five colour combinations per palette are checked with the real WCAG relative-luminance formula.
Palettes live in HSL so lightness is one control, and you still copy hex values for your design tool.
Every pairing says where the display face breaks down — minimum sizes, tracking, caps-only limits.
Seventies graphics leaned on rounded geometric display faces and heavy slabs; the eighties moved to inline neon scripts, squared technical sans and bitmap arcade faces. On Google Fonts the closest open equivalents are Righteous, Alfa Slab One and Pacifico for the seventies, and Monoton, Orbitron and Press Start 2P for the eighties.
WCAG 2.1 level AA needs 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text — large meaning at least 18 point (24px) regular or 14 point bold (18.66px). Level AAA raises those to 7:1 and 4.5:1. User-interface components and meaningful graphics need 3:1 under SC 1.4.11.
Because the eye judges hue and saturation while the formula judges luminance only. Mustard, coral and teal all sit near the middle of the luminance range, so two vivid retro colours can look strongly different and still be within 2:1 of each other. Change lightness rather than saturation to fix it.
The families listed here are published on Google Fonts under open licences, most commonly the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows commercial use, web embedding and modification. Licences can differ per family, so check the licence tab on each family's Google Fonts page before shipping a paid product.