74 best free fonts for designers
Finding the best free fonts can be a pain. Scrolling through thousands of seemingly similar fonts only to find the one you want costs a small fortune is often frustrating, especially when you know the perfect free font is out there.
That’s why we’ve created this post compiling the best free fonts available to download. We’ve also divided them into eight handy categories so you spend less time scrolling and more time delighting in the new free fonts you’ve found for your project. Our categories are:
- Serif fonts – often found in projects involving lengthy text, such as books, newspapers and magazines.
- Sans serif fonts – commonly used for shorter text settings, such as captions and credits. Sans serifs are also a good choice for an audience of young children or anyone learning to read.
- Handwriting fonts – lend an authentic handwritten feel to a project.
- Retro and vintage fonts – the perfect choice of typeface for transporting your designs back in time. These fonts also work really well in sci-fi-themed artwork.
- Brush fonts – like handwriting fonts, these are ideal for adding that handwritten touch, for example of invitations or greeting cards.
- Tattoo fonts – these brilliant free fonts can be just the thing for a tattoo design.
- Graffiti fonts – for adding an urban, gritty edge to any piece of artwork.
- Unusual fonts – because some free fonts defy categorisation.
If you’re after multiple fonts but aren’t sure which typefaces best complement each other, our list of perfect font pairings should help.
Note that at the time of writing, the typeface collections listed here can be used in your projects for free, but please be sure to check the terms of use before you download these free fonts, as some are only suitable for personal not commercial use.
So what are you waiting for? Find and download your perfect free font right here.
The best free fonts: Serif fonts
01. Woodland
Woodland has an understated elegance
Woodland is an elegant sans font with six weights designed by Mathieu Desjardins for Pangram Pangram. Commercial licences start from $30 but you can try Woodland for personal use for free. It’s a versatile font that would work in body copy as well as titles, and there’s an understated elegance to it that we really like.
- Free for personal use (commercial licences available)
- DOWNLOAD HERE
02. Giveny
Add a touch of class to your designs with Giveny
This classy free font lends a sophisticated feel to your project. It looks good on arty magazines, posters, greetings cards or quotes, and was created by Craft Supply Co. Multi-lingual characters are available, as are a range of punctuation marks. To use the font in your commercial projects, you can buy it for $15.
- Free for personal use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
03. Blacker
Blacker is not your average serif font
Blacker is not your average serif font. And that’s why we love it. A twist on a classic design, Blacker is a wedge serif font family, created by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli. The designers’ Behance page states Blacker is a “take on the contemporary ‘evil serif’ genre: typefaces with high contrast, 1970s-evoking proportions and sharp wedge serifs”.
Blacker is available in six weights, from light to heavy, with matching italics. Prices for Blacker start from $25, however you can currently get Blacker Text Light and Blacker Display Medium Italic completely free.
- Free for personal use (two weights only)
- DOWNLOAD HERE
04. Poly
Poly is legible on the web even at smaller sizes
Poly is a medium contrast serif font for web use. It was designed by Nicolás Silva to give increased legibility than other web serifs even at smaller point sizes. It achieves this with a vertical emphasis, utilising short ascenders and a very high x-height to ensure clarity.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
05. Coldiac
There’s more than a touch of luxury to this free font
For a luxurious serif font, look no further than Coldiac. It works well for a small amount of body text, or for headlines, print ads and other marketing materials. What makes Coldiac stand out is “the relatively low contrast of strokes, the slightly squarish shapes of round characters and the emphasised businesslike nature”, according to its creators. A commercial version of the font – which includes multilingual characters and illustrations is available for $15.
- Free for personal use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
06. Bitter
This serif font is designed to work well on screens
Sans-serif fonts tend to work better for screen use, but this free slab serif typeface has been specially designed to provide a comfortable reading experience on screens. Bitter was designed by Sol Matas, and is available through Argentinian type collaborative Huerta Tipográfica. It combines generous x-heights with minimal variation in stroke weight.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
07. Barbaro
We love the distressed detailing on this font
Barbaro is a free font created Iván Nuñez that comes in two styles: Barbaro Roman and Barbaro Western. Nuñez is from the Dominican Republic, where the word ‘barbaro’ has a range of meanings from ‘super’ or ‘fantastic’ to ‘crazy’ or ‘imprudent’ (we reckon this font is in line with the first two). Barbaro would look great on a poster or as part of a menu or signage and is available for use in your personal projects.
- Free for personal use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
08. Playfair Display
This free font family is an open source project
This free serif display font takes inspiration from the late 18th century European Enlightenment and the work of type designer John Baskerville. The high-contract letterforms have delicate hairlines, relating to the rise in popularity of pointed steel pens, which took over from the previous broad nib quills during this period. The typeface design is a project led designed by Dutch designer Claus Eggers Sørensen.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
09. Lora
Brushed curves contrast with driving serifs in this free font
Lora is a free font that has its roots in calligraphy. It was originally designed for type foundry Cyreal in 2011, with a Cyrillic extension added in 2013, and comes in four styles: regular, bold, italic, and bold italic.
Brushed curves contrast with driving serifs to give this free font a well-balanced, contemporary feel. Although Lora is technically optimised for use on the web, it also works well in print projects.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
10. Butler
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Free font Butler brings a sense of modernism to the serif
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Inspired by both Dala Floda and the Bodoni family, Butler is a free font designed by Fabian De Smet. His aim was to bring a bit of modernism to serif fonts by working on the curves of classical serif fonts, and adding an extra stencil family.
The Butler family contains 334 characters, seven regular weights and seven stencil weights, and includes text figures, ligatures and fractions. It also suits many different languages with its added glyphs. De Smet suggests it would work well for “posters, very big titles, books and fancy stuff”.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
11. Arvo
A superior geometric slab-serif, Arvo is one of our favourite free fonts
Arvo is a geometric slab-serif font family that’s suitable for both screen and print use. Designed for legibility, it was created by Anton Koovit and published in the Google Font directory as a free open font (OFL). Unlike many slab serifs on Google Fonts, Arvo contains normal, italic, bold and bold italic styles.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
12. Crimson Text
Crimson Text is a free font family inspired by old-time book typefaces
Here’s a free font family created specifically for book production, inspired by old-time, Garamond-esque book typefaces. Crimson Text is the work of German-born, Toronto-based designer Sebastian Kosch, who says he was influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler.
It’s also favourite free font of Taylor Palmer, a senior UX designer based in Utah, USA. “Crimson is a sophisticated serif that makes a nice alternative to traditional Garamond-esque typefaces,” he says. “It also has a very expressive italic, which pairs nicely with strong, geometric sans-serifs like Futura or Avenir.”
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
13. Aleo
Aleo is one of those rare free fonts that manages to balance personality with legibility perfectly
Aleo has semi-rounded details and a sleek structure, giving a sense of personality while maintaining a good level of legibility. This free font family comprises six styles: three weights (light, regular and bold), with corresponding true italics. Released under the SIL Open Font License, it was designed by Alessio Laiso, a designer at IBM Dublin, as the slab serif companion to Lato.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
14. Brela
Free font Brela works well in editorial designs, both for headlines and body text
Brela is a humanistic serif font designed exclusively for editorial design. With a generous x-height, it’s very legible, even at tiny sizes, yet it works equally well in bold, large headlines. This free font was designed by Spanish creative agency Makarska Studio and comes in regular and bold weights.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
15. Libre Baskerville
Free font Libre Baskerville is optimised for reading body text on screen
Libre Baskerville is a web font optimised for body text (typically 16px). It’s based on the American Type Founder’s Baskerville from 1941, but it has a taller x-height, wider counters and a little less contrast, allowing it to work well for reading on screen. This open source project is led by Impallari Type, a type design foundry based in Rosario, Argentina.
“I like to keep my eye on the Libre fonts, like Libre Baskerville,” enthuses Taylor Palmer, a senior UX designer based in Utah, USA. He also recommends you check out its sister font, Libre Franklin, which is also free. “Libre Franklin hearkens back to strong, traditional typefaces, like Franklin Gothic, that have the declarative nature of something like a newspaper headline but are simple enough to set as paragraph text,” he explains.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
16. Slabo
A modern serif font tuned to pixel perfection
Slabo was designed by John Hudson, co-founder of Tiro Typeworks foundry. Slabo is a growing collection of size-specific web fonts, with Slabo 27px and Slabo 13px out so far, fine-tuned precisely for use at those specific pixel sizes. The blocky feel of its ligatures give a modern twist to the serif font, perfect for online designs.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
17. Merriweather
Merriweather is featured in more than 3,000,000 websites, according to Google Fonts
A truly open source free serif font, Merriweather has its own project on GitHub. It was designed by Sorkin Type to be easy to read on screens, particularly. “It features a very large x-height, slightly condensed letterforms, a mild diagonal stress, sturdy serifs and open forms,” it says.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
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Serif fonts