9 of the best free serif fonts

Grenze is a free serif font created by Renata Polastri and Omnibus-Type. This useful and adaptable typeface system consists of nine weights ranging from Thin to Black and comes complete with matching italics. Designed as a hybrid of Roman and blackletter fonts, it combines striking visual impact with functional readability. It serves well as a font for magazines, but would be adaptable to a number of creative projects. Grenze is published under the SIL Open Font License, making it free to use in all projects.

Melisande Sharp is a hand-drawn serif created by Brittney Murphy. While most serifs are used as a visual shorthand for authority and gravitas, this playful typeface brings an element of fun to your design. With delightful flourishes like the pot belly-shaped bowl on the lowercase 'a' and the incredibly high crossbar on the 'f', it has a distinctly lively feel, perfect for projects requiring a personal touch. It's free for personal use and for typical commercial use, you'll need a standard license that costs only $8.

Saonara is a sleek serif font that embodies a luxury look. Designed by Denis Schepin of MADE Type, the classy font takes inspiration from the fashion world with it's elevated appeal. The gloriously elegant design features strokes that veer between whip-thin and super-chunky, cut through by razor sharp serifs that add a tasteful edge. Saonara is free for personal use, while a licence for commercial will cost you from just $14 at fontspring.com.

Red Delicious is a playful take on the classic varsity font often used on sweatshirts and apparel. Created by designer Dan Zadorozny, it's part of his Iconian fonts site which is well worth a snoop for more typographic inspiration. Red Delicious features slightly rounded serifs that give the character a full-bodied weight and feel. The set comes with 25 different versions, each with an extended Latin character collection. The font is free for personal use and open for commercial use via a $20 donation.

There's nothing fishy about Halibut Serif, an open-source display and paragraph font from Colllettivo. It's another lively free serif font that comes in three weights – Regular, Expanded and Condensed – each packing in 234 glyphs. We particularly love Halibut's sharp, toothy serifs, which look like they could bite your hand off. Like all of Colllettivo's fonts, it's free to use on any project.

Afterglow is a modern and classic serif typeface by Vintage Voyage. Full of contrast lines and with plenty of stylistic alternates, it's just the thing for retro-looking headlines with a bit of a 1970s feel, and it's free for personal use while a commercial licence is available for $14.

Another serif font from MADE Type that's free for personal use, Coachella is a contrasting serif font family in six weights from Thin to Black. In the heavier weights, the contrast between line widths across the font is even more extreme than in Saonara, but the look's a lot more approachable; we love its quirky touches such as the terminal on the lower-case 'a' and the triangular tail on the upper-case 'Q'. 

Created by Brazilian designer Anísio Dega, Adega Serif is a print-focused font designed with books, newspapers and magazines in mind, and shaped to give maximum comfort to the reader. Coming on like a softer alternative to something like Book Antiqua, it features wonderfully tall ascenders and some beautifully hand-drawn quirks, and it comes in regular and bold weights with matching italics. It's available as donationware; if you get good use out of it then be sure to donate.

Linux fans will have doubtless noticed the resemblance between Libertinus Serif and Linux's Libertine and Biolinum fonts, and there's a good reason for that. Libertinus Serif is a fork of those fonts that addresses some of their bugs, and it's a classic-looking serif font that comes in 14 styles to suit all manner of uses. Published under the SIL Open Font Licence, it's good for all applications.