Currently, I am using Montserrat. Even though it is licensed under Open License Font, I do not feel comfortable using it anymore, probably because it is used in over 17 million websites and is considered overused.
Another reason is that I have to load multiple font weights, as bold tags do not work as intended. A single weight is over 20kb in size (after removing unused glyphs). I want to keep my site lightweight, and good looking.
Have only read the title. There is this cool font I found recently. It's called comic sans and it's really neat. Just use it with color="red" on a black background! Looks super cool!
Have you considered just using the user's browser font via sans-serif?
I did this on my website some time ago and honestly feels like it is the best way. You're repecting the user's wishes if they have a custom typeface specified, and the defaults on most OS' are good these days otherwise.
Plus, you save some network requests and page size.
Have you tried to put a bigger emphasis on good content instead of micromanaging exotic fonts?
Just take one of the common standard fonts. Most of them are tried and tested for readbility and quality. Bonus: Nobody needs to download them from somewhere just to get your website "right". Which means less problems and faster loading times.
The internet is about information, not aesthetics. Sure, pick a nice font - no one wants Geocities back but don't make your page call off to a dozen separate locations for crappy .js frameworks and remote fonts, please!
So, 20kB is not that much, honestly (even considering you probably need 4*20=80kB for regular/bold/italic/bold italic). I would just set a suitable caching policy in the server software and leave it at that. Regarding fonts being overused — unfortunately pretty much all the higher-quality ones from Google Fonts are. If you find another suitable font from Google Fonts, you may not be happy for too long.
(I used to maintain a website at work that delivered 1.5MB of CSS (600kB compressed), consisting of Bootstrap, Bootstrap extras, and then the previous two designs of the website layered on top of each other. That is sad.)