The best free fonts: Sans-serif fonts
19. Red Hat
Fedora not required
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 its font, designed by Jeremy Mickel as part of its Pentagram-led branding exercise. Red Hat, the font, is inspired by American sans serifs, and comes in two optical sizes and a range of weights. And like Linux itself, it's free to use (but a lot easier to get to grips with).
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
20. Public Sans
A sensible sans for serious projects
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.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
21. Loki
Loki is great for titles
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. Loki was created by Krisjanis Mezulisand Ieva Mezule – apparently the name was inspired by the "trickster" Norse god, Loki. This is one for making a statement, and works particularly well in large titles.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
22. Manrope
This modern typeface comes with icon ligatures
Manrope was created by Michael Sharanda, and is an open-source font family that was designed for multiple, modern uses: it works in titles, paragraphs, print and on the web. This is the second version of the font, and comes in seven styles. There's no italics available (the creator believes italics isn't necessary in modern times), but the font covers most Latin and Cyrillic languages. It also has clever features such as the ability to automatically switch to straight or curly quotes.
- Free for personal and commercial use (see terms for commercial use)
- DOWNLOAD HERE
23. Salt
Atmospheric font Salt comes in two weights: regular and bold. It was created by Masha Chuprova and has a 'low centre of gravity'. We love the octopus illustrations used to demonstrate it, too. It's free for personal and commerical use, though you'll need to give your name and email to Pixel Surplus in order to download it.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
24. Alcubierre
This clean, minimal font works for a variety of uses
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. Ellis is super-generous too, offering both designs to all totally free for both personal and commercial use.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
25. Moon
Moon is free for personal use
Moon is a rounded, sans-serif font that comes in three weights and has recently been updated to include a lowercase. It's the work of designer Jack Harvatt, who has made it available to download on his Behance page. Moon is free for personal projects, but if you want to use it commercially you'll need to pay for a licence.
- Free for personal use only
- DOWNLOAD HERE
26. Big John / Slim Joe
These two sans-serif fonts work together perfectly
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 fonts are ideal for titles and headlines, and can be downloaded for free on Behance.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
27. Titillium Web
For a free font, 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, and they ask all graphic designers who use Titillium in their projects to email them some examples of the typeface family in use, to help them develop it further.
“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.”
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
28. Atami
Atami is a bold font with a modern feel
Atami's a pretty experimental typeface, and that's why we love it. It comes in two different weights and three styles and would be ideal for creating posters and logotypes. It was made by Andrew Herndon and is free for both personal and commercial use, although donations (as always) are appreciated.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
29. Chivo
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.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
30. Comfortaa
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.”
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
31. Noto Sans
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.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
32. HK Grotesk
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).
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
33. Aileron
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.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
34. Ubuntu
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.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
35. Clear Sans
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 (it has, for instance, been adopted by Mozilla for the ‘Firefox for Android’ browser).
Created by Daniel Ratighan at Monotype under the direction of Intel, Clear Sans supports a wide range of languages using Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, and includes medium, regular, thin, and light weights with upright, italic, and bold styles.
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
36. Source Sans Pro
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.”
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Also read: 20 fonts every graphic designer should own
Next page: Free handwriting fonts
