82 best free fonts for designers

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Inject energy into your designs with the best free fonts, and these top options could be yours now.

The best free fonts: Sans-serif fonts

21. Skye

Best free fonts: Sample of Skye

As versatile as it is beautiful, Skye knocks other free fonts for six (Image credit: Jonathan Hill )

Combining both humanist and geometric elements, Skye is a versatile sans serif that beautifully blends narrowly rounded letter shapes with subtle square detailing. Designed by Jonathan Hill, it’s perfect for use in digital design projects, including film titles, user interfaces and the web. 

Also read: The best italic fonts right now

22. Obrazec

Best free fonts: Sample of Obrazec

Obrazec is one of the boldest, most confident free fonts around (Image credit: Ilya Zakharov )

Obrazec is an uncompromising, industrial-style sans serif created by Ilya Zakharov. This sturdy and confident typeface is one of the best free fonts for adding strength and personality to your branding projects, whether you're working on logo design, promotional materials, or advertising. 

23. Archive Grotesk

Best free fonts: Sample of Free Archive Grotesk

Free Archive Grotesk is one of the best free fonts for invitations, calendars and other stationery  (Image credit: Tomas Clarkson)

Created by Tomas Clarkson, Free Archive Grotesk is a clean and minimalist sans that features uppercase, lowercase and numerals. It’s one of those free fonts that would work well in everything from headlines and magazine page furniture to invitations, calendars, postcards and fashion designs. 

24. Animosa

Best free fonts: Sample of Animosa

Animosa is clean, modern and eye catching (Image credit: Stefano Giliberti)

Animosa is a clean modern sans-serif that comes with a wide range of unique characters. from Created by Stefano Giliberti, this font is available in five weights and includes 93 languages and 508 glyphs. It's one of the best fonts we’ve seen for drawing the reader’s eye to the page, and keeping it there.

25. Red Hat

Best free fonts: Sample of Red Hat

Fedora not required  (Image credit: Red Hat)

If you're not down with Linux and open source then this name's not going to mean a lot to you; don't worry too much about that, because all we're interested in here the font, designed by Jeremy Mickel. It's inspired by American sans serifs, and comes in two optical sizes and a range of weights. 

26. Public Sans

Best free fonts: Sample of Public Sans

A sensible sans for serious projects (Image credit: Public Sans)

Based on Libre Franklin and created as part of the United States Web Design System, Public Sans is a free, open source web font designed to be used in interfaces, text and headings. It's a strong, sober font with a neutral look, plenty of weights and as few quirks as possible; ideal for serious projects where you're trying to avoid unnecessary visual distraction.

27. Loki

Best free fonts: Sample of Loki

Loki is great for titles (Image credit: Wild Picks)

Loki is a bit of a hybrid font, it's a hand-written brush script with a sans serif base, and contains some rather pleasing curves. Created by Krisjanis Mezulisand Ieva Mezule, this is one for making a statement, and works particularly well in large titles.

28. Salt

Best free fonts: Sample of salt

Salt is wonderfully atmospheric  (Image credit: Masha Chuprova)

Atmospheric font Salt comes in two weights: regular and bold. It was created by Masha Chuprova and has a 'low centre of gravity'. Note that you'll need to give your name and email to Pixel Surplus in order to download it for free. 

29. Alcubierre

Best free fonts: Sample of Alcubierre

This clean, minimal font works for a variety of uses (Image credit: Web Designer Depot)

Geometric sans serif typeface Alcubierre is the work of designer Matt Ellis. Following in the footsteps of his original free font Ikaros, this clean, minimal typeface works for a variety of uses. 

30. Big John / Slim Joe

Best free fonts: Sample of Big John and Slim Joe

These two sans-serif fonts work together perfectly (Image credit: Ion Lucin)

Big John was created by designer Ion Lucin for his personal use. Eventually, he decided to share it on Behance, and then went on to add an ultra-light sister font: Slim Joe. Both are all-caps fonts, and contrast perfectly when combined together. These free fonts are ideal for titles and headlines. 

31. Titillium Web

Best free fonts: Sample of Titillium

Titillium is a free font that works best at larger sizes  (Image credit: Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino/Cufon Fonts)

As free fonts go, Titillium has a highly respectable pedigree, born of a type design project at Italy’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino. Each academic year, a dozen students work on the project, developing it further and solving problems.

"Titillium has been a favourite font of mine for a few years now," says Rob Hampson, head of design at The Bot Platform, a platform for building bots on Messenger. "It’s sharp, contemporary and comes in a wide range of weights. In my opinion, it works best in larger sizes; for example, for titles. That said, with careful consideration, it could be used as a body font."

32. Atami

Best free fonts: Sample of Atami

Atami is a bold font with a modern feel (Image credit: Andrew Herndon)

Atami's a pretty experimental typeface that comes in two different weights and three styles. Made by Andrew Herndon, we think it would be a particularly good choice for creating posters and logotypes. 

33. Chivo

Best free fonts: Sample of Chivo

Chivo is one of the most eye-catching free fonts around (Image credit: Omnibus Type)

Chivo is a grotesque typeface that’s ideal for headlines, and other page furniture where you want to grab attention. Both confident and elegant, it’s been released in four weights with matching italics. This free font is the work of Héctor Gatti and the Omnibus-Type Team.

34. Comfortaa

Best free fonts: Sample of Comfortaa

Free font Comfortaa could work well in a logo design (Image credit: Google Fonts)

Comfortaa is a rounded geometric sans-serif type design intended for large sizes. Created by Johan Aakerlund, a design engineer at the Technical University of Denmark, it’s a simple, good looking font that includes large number of different characters and symbols. Part of the Google Font Improvements Project, the latest updates to the family include the addition of a Cyrillic character set and support for Vietnamese. 

David Airey, a graphic designer and occasional writer in Northern Ireland, is among its admirers. "A lot of free fonts need too much work cleaning up the points, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find good options," he says. "For an identity project, I used Comfortaa as the base for a bespoke wordmark. The before and after are really quite different, but Johan’s work gave me a great foundation, and the client loves the result."

35. Noto Sans

Best free fonts: Sample of Noto Sans

One of the most flexible free fonts around, Noto Sans supports more than 800 languages (Image credit: Google Fonts)

Noto Sans is a free font family designed by Google supporting more than 100 writing systems, 800 languages, and hundreds of thousands of characters. Noto fonts are intended to be visually harmonious across multiple languages, with compatible heights and stroke thicknesses. The family include regular, bold, italic and bold italic styles, and it has a serif sister family, Noto Serif.

36. HK Grotesk

Best free fonts: sample of HK Grotesk

HK Grotesk is one of our favourite free fonts for casting small text (Image credit: Hanken Design Co)

HK Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface inspired by the classic grotesques, such as Akzidenz Grotesk, Univers, Trade Gothic and Gill Sans. It was designed by Hanken Design Co with the aim of creating a friendly and distinguishable font that’s suitable for small text. It has recently expanded its language support with the addition of Cyrillic characters (Bulgarian, Russian and Serbian).

37. Aileron

Best free fonts: Sample of Aileron

One of our favourite hybrid free fonts, Aileron is a relaxed choice for on-screen reading (Image credit: Tipotype)

Aileron is a versatile, neo-grotesque sans-serif that’s somewhere between Helvetica and Univers. Created by Sora Sagano, a designer at Tipotype, it aims to provide readers with a high level of visual comfort. It’s available in 16 weights, from ultralight to black. 

38. Ubuntu

Best free fonts: Sample of Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a custom-designed free font for screen use  (Image credit: Ubuntu/Dalton Maag)

This free font has been specially created to complement the tone of voice of Ubuntu, the Linux operating system for personal computers, tablets and smartphones. Designed by font foundry Dalton Maag, it uses OpenType features and is manually hinted for clarity on desktop and mobile screens. 

39. Clear Sans

Best free fonts: Sample of Clear sans

Who knew Intel did free fonts? (Image credit: Intel)

Clear Sans is a versatile font designed by Intel designed with on-screen legibility in mind. Suitable for screen, print, and web, this free font is notable for its minimised characters and slightly narrow proportions, making it a great choice for UI design, from short labels to long passages.

40. Source Sans Pro

Best free fonts: Sample of Source sans pro

Adobe’s first foray into open source type, Source Sans Pro is one of the design community’s most popular free fonts (Image credit: Adobe)

Released in 2012, Source Sans Pro was the first open source type family for Adobe, and has proved wildly popular. It was envisioned as a classic grotesque typeface with a simple, unassuming design, intended to work well in user interfaces. It was designed by Paul D. Hunt,  who continues to work as a type designer at Adobe.

Source Sans Pro is one of the favourite free fonts of James Hollingworth, a senior-level digital designer and illustrator based near Bath, UK. “It’s such a solid, reliable font to use in design work,” he enthuses. “Being dyslexic myself, I find it a very easy font to read, and it works brilliantly in user interfaces.” 

Also read: Fonts every graphic designer should own

Next page: Free handwriting fonts

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