Easter is a weird holiday; a Christian celebration with decidedly pagan iconography, and you can never be quite sure when it's going to happen each year. Christmas is easy – 25 December – but Easter's a movable feast with an incredibly obtuse formula for calculating the date: the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March.
As you've doubtless worked out, this means that Easter this year falls on 12 April, and while you'll have finished and submitted any Easter commissions right now, there's always the possibility of a last-minute job. Be prepared with this selection of free fonts with an Easter theme; they're just what you need to give the finishing touch to any Easter designs.
01. Bunny
When it comes to Easter fonts you basically have four choices: rabbit-based, egg-based, decorative in a kind-of Easter style, or dingbats. We're giving the dingbats a miss and instead starting with Bunny, a rabbit-based font from Flop Design.
It's a fun lower case font, with each glyph created using fat, rounded strokes, and the ascenders and descenders turned into long, bunny ear-like loops. And if that's not sufficiently bunny-like for you, an alternate set adds rabbit face details to each letter; use it sparingly. It's a freeware non-commercial font; contact the designer if you want to use it for commercial projects.
02. Happy Easter
There's certain naive charm to Happy Easter by Des Gomez. It's a tall script font that mixes upper and lower case characters in a single set, and has the appearance of the sort of lettering you'd get on an Easter card designed at school by a child who hasn't quite got the hang of the entire alphabet yet.
The 'd', 'e' and 'a' are particularly strange, but we have something of a soft spot for its haphazard style, and there's the added bonus of a single hand-drawn Easter egg character. It's donationware, so be sure to send the designer some money if you use it for a work.
03. Easter Fun by Tom
Designed by Tom Brown, Easter Fun is an all-caps cartoon font that gets its Easter flavour from sets of hand-drawn lines across the upper and lower portions of each character, in the style of traditional Easter egg decoration. It's a simple but effective technique that you could accentuate by colouring the lines in different shades. Easter Fun is free for personal use.
04. Bunny Rabbits
Got your heart set on a more rabbity Easter font? Don't you worry; Bunny Rabbits by GemFonts is a gloriously leporine font with at least one rabbit per character. Each letter is formed by a cartoon rabbit or two in a suitably spring-like pose; you'll even spot actual Easter eggs in some of the characters. Wonderfully quirky and fun, Bunny Rabbits is free for both personal and commercial use.
05. Easter Sunrise
Apart from eggs and rabbits, there isn't really much imagery to draw upon when you're coming up with an Easter design. There's the whole crucifixion thing, but when do you ever see that on an Easter egg? We actually found one font that played on that, but it was terrible; hand-scrawled letters with crosses drawn over them as an afterthought.
Anyway, here's Easter Sunrise; it's a bit of a stretch to link sunrises with Easter, but maybe it says something about emerging from the long, dark winter months. Again, one to colour in by hand if you have the time, and it's freeware so you can use it for anything you like.
06. DJB Eggscellent
All right, we've kept you waiting for egg-based fonts long enough. You just know that DJB Eggscellent is going to be great, purely on the basis of the egg pun in its name, and it doesn't disappoint. It's a full set of hand-drawn letters in both upper and lower cases, each one contained in a little egg, and as an extra bonus there's a small set of characters in the form of decorated Easter eggs. Created by DJB Fonts, it's free for personal use.
07. EasterFont
Free for personal and non-profit use (with the request that you don't use it for political campaigns), EasterFont is our second egg-based offering. Unlike DJB Eggscellent it has no lower case characters; it's all hand-drawn upper case, but with the choice of solid or stroked eggs.
We slightly prefer the look of EasterFont's letters; they're slightly more lively than the ones in DJB Eggscellent, and they fill their egg container better too. Really, though, there's not a lot to choose between them; why not get both?
08. Bunny Hopper Ear
If you're the sort of person who stands behind someone having their photo taken so that you can extend a pair of fingers behind their head to give them bunny ears, this is the font for you.
Bunny Hopper Ears is a cartoon font in which every single letter has a pair of bunny ears stuck on top. How much more Easter can you get? It's for personal use only; you can get a commercial licence for just $12, and it comes with an additional style that doesn't have the bunny ears; where's the fun in that?
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