Looking for fresh typography inspiration? These 7 sites provide great places to find it.
Ever spent time scrolling through font libraries, only to experience the typography equivalent of snow blindness? Us too. And we’ve found that when that happens, it can be helpful to refocus your energies by looking at creative uses of typography in the wild.
These sites all curate and collate the latest and greatest examples of typography in design. And in doing so, they can provide a blast of fresh inspiration to help you get started with your own creative projects.
If there’s a great typography gallery we’ve missed, though, please let us know about it in the comments below!
Typeverything provides a great selection of hand-lettered designs
Typeverything.com is a Tumblr blog devoted to great typography and design brought to you by Andrei Robu. Its gallery section is packed with inspiration, mainly centred around hand-lettered designs. Each post is tagged with terms such as ‘drop cap’, ‘illustrated’ and ‘dimensional’, plus there’s a handy ‘You may also like’ section at the bottom.
Typewolf shows examples of “how real type performs on actual websites”
Typewolf was launched in 2013 by Colorado-based designer Jeremiah Shoaf. Working as a designer, he was frustrated by the lack of good resources for choosing fonts for design projects. “Seeing type samples set in ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ isn’t very useful when it comes to web design,” he reasons. “Seeing how real type performs on actual websites is much more helpful.” That’s exactly what Type Wolf has set out to do and it’s been hugely popular, attracting more than one million page views a day.
We Love Typography is packed with beautiful uses of typography, online and offline
We Love Typography is a curated gallery of type-related content created by John Boardley and Kari Pätilä. With contributions from leading designers such as Khoi Vinh, Veerle Pieters, Jon Tan, Hannah Donovan and Jason Santa Maria, this site is packed to the rafters with exciting new fonts and beautiful uses of typography (online and offline), as well as a useful search function.
Incredible Types is a curated collection of typography-led design, centred mainly on print work. Maintained and curated by Nathan Leigh Davis, it currently features 426 pieces of inspirational design in its showcase, from 432 creatives and studios from 51 different countries. To uncover the comprehensive tagging system, click ‘Show menu’ at the top of the page.
Friends of Type features original typographic design from four main contributors
Friends of Type is an image-led blog featuring original typographic design, more or less every day, largely from four primary contributors: Aaron Carámbula, Erik Marinovich, Dennis Payongayong and Jason Wong. It’s actually centred around hand lettering rather than set type (in mitigation, they plead that “Friends of Lettering isn’t a very catchy URL”). On the last week of every month, the blog also features the work of a guest designer.
TypeInspire makes it simple to find what you’re looking for quickly
TypeInspire is a type-led showcase mainly featuring the work of graphic designers and web designers. It accepts submissions of typography, text effects, motion graphics, kinetic typography videos, print design, posters and brochures. With both search functionality and a handy tagging system, based on terms such as ‘distressed’, ‘splatter’ and ‘kinetic typography’, this niche gallery site makes it simple to find what you’re looking for quickly.
Collaborative project Fonts in Use provides just what its title suggests: an independent collection of typography in ‘real world’ projects. Featuring everything from book jackets to packaging, there’s advanced search functionality, plus the work is listed by font use, providing a different perspective from the average typography gallery.
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Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
