The Best Free Fonts for 2021
New year, new fonts! From curvy retro serifs to perfectly minimal sans serifs, you don’t need to stretch the purse strings to get great type for your buck.
These free fonts can be used for commercial or personal projects, and come with no strings attached. Simply download, install and use! Read on to discover our pick of the best 15 free fonts you can download and use in your projects in 2021.
Sans Serifs
Clean, contemporary and enduringly stylish, sans serif are the workhorse of any designer’s font catalogue. The newest free sans serif fonts are distinctively characterful, with a retro mood for 2021.
1. Malik
Designed in 2020 by Andrea Tartarelli, Malik is a ‘flared’ serif, with a retro-meets-bookish feel. The lighter weights in the sixteen-style family are perfect for subtle and chic typesetting, while the bolshier display styles have an assertive, 70s-tinted character that would look fantastic on packaging and logo designs.
Download a single Book weight for free here.
2. Klein
A thorough and contemporary tribute to Futura, Klein is a geometric typeface with humanist touches. A workhorse superfamily of 54 fonts, this is the ultimate sans serif for designers who appreciate adaptability.
Designed by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli, you can download two weights, Text Book and Text Book Italic, for free from Fontspring.
3. Palo
A semi-grotesque sans serif with a huge range of 72 styles, Palo combines heavily condensed syles with wide weights to achieve a diverse and on-trend type style. Download Palo Wide Light and Palo Compressed Medium for free, and combine to create eye-catching typography for editorial layouts or poster designs.
4. Alata
Alata is a geometric sans serif with classical undertones, drawing its inspiration from early 20th Century poster lettering and Greek type styles. A subtly quirky and friendly sans serif, the font is highly legible, making it a great choice for signage or body text.
Download Alata Regular for free on FontSquirrel.
5. JT Energy
Inspired by the work of German typeface designer Paul Renner, the designer of iconic sans serif Futura, JT Energy pays tribute to the early Modernist heritage of geometric sans. Complete with slanted edges and a distinctly Swiss style, this is a super-stylish sans serif that is available as a complete family of seven styles. Download the Extra Light weight for free here.
6. Shapiro Pro
Shapiro Pro is a diverse modern Grotesque sans serif with an extremely broad range of 74 styles. Designed with advertising and editorial layouts in mind, the varying weights of the typeface make for a high-contrast, contemporary pairing.
You can download the Shapiro Pro 22 Super Fly and Shapiro Pro 34 Bantam weights for free from Fontspring.
Display Sans
Looking for something a bit bolder and more dramatic for large-scale type projects? These new free sans serif fonts for display will help to bring your headlines bang up-to-date.
7. Hagrid
Designed by Cosimo Pancini, Hagrid is a celebration of typographic extremes, with high-contrast contact points and exaggerated curves giving it a vintage character that nonetheless feels clean and cutting-edge. Use on designs that require immediate and off-beat visual impact, from packaging to web banners.
Hagrid Regular, Hagrid Italic, Hagrid Text and Hagrid Text Italic are available free of charge here.
8. Stinger
Combining thick verticals and thin horizontals, Stinger is a cool and quirky typeface inspired by Wild West and circus typography. With its vibrant personality, Stinger is best suited to headlines and logos—it also looks fantastic teamed with energetic photography on magazine and poster layouts.
The Slim Italic, Bold Italic, Fit Light and Wide Thin styles are all completely free to download here.
9. Gogh
Chunky and playful, while retaining a clean, minimal look, Gogh is a versatile sans serif suited to both body text and display. With an open design, Gogh is highly legible and is also available as a variable font, suitable for flexible web design.
You can download two weight, Extra Bold and Extra Bold Italic, from Fontspring.
10. Garbata
A sans serif font with a slightly serif character, Garbata is a curvy and calligraphic typeface. The perfect font for designers torn between using a sans or a serif, this free display sans font is an exercise in balance and typographic artistry.
Garbata Regular is free to download from Fontspring.
Serifs
While serifs used to be the traditional and conservative counterpart to sans serifs’ modernist personalities, 2020 has proved that serifs are ever-evolving. With exaggerated inversions, quirky ligatures and elegant calligraphic influences, these free serif fonts will bring beauty and elegance to any design.
11. Fiorina Text
A sophisticated, Didone-style serif designed by Andriy Konstantynov, Fiorina Text is a classic serif font that can be used for typesetting magazines or books. With its slightly compressed x-height, this free serif font has a more contemporary character than traditional bookish serifs.
The Light and Light Italic weights are free to download here.
12. Mondia
Designed by Nasir Udin, Mondia is a serif typeface with a sans serif character, combing clean, modern styling with 1920s influences. A tall x-height gives this free serif font an elegant, almost haughty character, making it an excellent fit for high-end branding or luxury packaging.
Download two styles of Mondia for free from Fontsquirrel.
Display Serifs
A chunkier, more dramatic serif is required for large-scale type, such as headlines, logos and posters. These new free serif fonts are optimised for display, with 70s-inspired styles set to be popular over 2021.
13. Bogart
A distinct and retro-flavored display serif which pays tribute to 1960s and 1970s typefaces, in particular Cooper Black, Bogart has an effortlessly cool and classic style befitting of the actor after which it was named.
Posters, logos and websites will be the best canvas for Bogart, and you can download two weights, Light Italic and Semi Bold, for free here.
14. Amagro
Bold, theatrical and with a stone-carved style, Amagro is a classical-infused display font designed by Fabio Servolo. A cooler and more contemporary take on the Roman style of Trajan Pro, this free serif font will suit posters and landing pages which require a monumental mood.
15. Vendura
Vendura is a didone-style display serif with a fashionable character. Crisp, sharp edges and a compressed x-height increases the style and legibility of the font, making it an ideal serif for apps, blogs or magazines.
Designed by Marc Lohner, two styles—Vendura Demo Semi Bold and Vendura Demo Semi Bold Italic—are available for free download here.
