Best fonts for graphic designers: free faces, display faces and the licence for each

How the best fonts for graphic designers are grouped here

Most lists are sorted by taste, which is why most lists are useless the second time you read them. The grouping here is by job, because that is the only sort that survives contact with a brief. A face that is excellent at nine point in a paragraph is very often mediocre at ninety point on a poster, and the reverse is more common still.

Four groups cover almost everything a designer sets: text, for continuous reading; interface, for labels, buttons and dense data; display, for the one line that carries the page; and monospaced, for code, tables and anywhere the columns have to line up. Every entry below states its group, its designer or foundry, and its licence.

Every face named on this page is one that ships under an open licence, is documented by its own foundry, and is still maintained. Faces that are widely recommended but abandoned, or whose licence terms are unclear, are left out rather than listed with a warning.

Text faces: twelve that hold up in a paragraph

A text face is judged at the size it will be read at, on the surface it will be read on, in a paragraph long enough to get tired in. Nothing else predicts it. The following twelve hold up under that test.

Serif

• EB Garamond: Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo. A Garalde revival worked from the Egenolff-Berner specimen rather than from a later interpretation. Open Font Licence.
• Crimson Pro: Sebastian Kosch, later extended by Jacques Le Bailly. Old-style proportions with a taller x-height than the originals, which is what makes it survive on screen.
• Literata: TypeTogether, commissioned for a reading application, so its brief was long-form legibility on a backlit surface and nothing else.
• Spectral: Production Type. Drawn specifically for screen text at small sizes, with a low contrast that would look under-articulated in print and is exactly right here.
• Alegreya: Juan Pablo del Peral, Huerta Tipográfica. Calligraphic, slightly irregular, and unusually good at long stretches of prose in Spanish and English alike.
• Vollkorn: Friedrich Althausen. Sturdy, warm, and forgiving of bad printing, which also means forgiving of bad rendering.

Sans for text

• Source Sans 3: Paul D. Hunt for Adobe. The reference open humanist sans, and the one most often used as a control when testing something else.
• Libre Franklin: Impallari Type, an interpretation of Franklin Gothic with a full weight range.
• Public Sans: derived from Libre Franklin for the United States Web Design System, which means it was drawn against an accessibility specification rather than a mood board.
• Work Sans: Wei Huang. Optimised at the extremes: the light weights for display, the middle weights for text.
• Archivo: Omnibus-Type. A grotesque with a genuinely wide family, including a condensed axis that solves the narrow-column problem without squashing anything.
• Manrope: Mikhail Sharanda. Semi-geometric, variable, and one of the few geometric sans faces that does not become tiring by the third paragraph.

Interface faces: nine drawn for screens rather than pages

Interface type is a separate craft. The requirements are unglamorous: unambiguous numerals, a one that cannot be a lowercase L, an I that cannot be either, tabular figures that hold a column, and enough weight range to build a hierarchy inside a twelve-pixel band.

• Inter: Rasmus Andersson. Drawn from the beginning for computer screens, with a tall x-height, open apertures and a set of optional character alternates for exactly the ambiguity problems above.
• IBM Plex Sans: Mike Abbink with Bold Monday. A corporate commission released under an open licence, with matching serif and monospaced siblings.
• Fira Sans: Erik Spiekermann and Ralph du Carrois, originally for a mobile operating system, so drawn for small sizes on poor screens.
• Roboto: Christian Robertson. The default on a very large number of devices, which is both its strongest recommendation and its main drawback.
• Noto Sans: the widest script coverage of any open family, which matters the moment a project stops being English-only.
• Rubik: Hubert and Fischer. Slightly rounded corners, which reads as friendly without becoming childish.
• Barlow: Jeremy Tribby. A grotesque with genuinely useful condensed and semi-condensed widths in the same family.
• Karla: Jonathan Pinhorn. Grotesque with unusual, slightly awkward details that give an interface a voice without costing legibility.
• Kumbh Sans: a neutral geometric sans with a full variable weight axis. It is the text face of this reference, which is why the measurements quoted on the anatomy page use it as one of the comparisons.

Display faces and the size they were drawn for

A display face is designed for one size and one job. Judging it in a paragraph is a category error, and so is using it in one. The eleven below are the ones that keep their shape when set very large, which is the only place they belong.

• Playfair Display: Claus Eggers Sørensen. High contrast, transitional bones, and the hairlines that come with them. Above about twenty-four point it is superb; below it, it thins out.
• Bebas Neue: Ryoichi Tsunekawa. Caps only, tightly spaced, and one of the most used display faces on the web, which is worth knowing before choosing it.
• Oswald and Anton; both begun by Vernon Adams. Condensed grotesques built for headlines in narrow columns.
• Righteous: Astigmatic. A geometric display face with an unusually large x-height, measured on this site at 75.1 % of its cap height. It is the display face of this reference.
• Bitter: Sol Matas. A contemporary slab that works at both display and subhead sizes, which is rarer than it sounds.
• Zilla Slab: Typotheque for Mozilla. A slab with cut-in corners that stop it looking like every other slab.
• Space Grotesk: drawn out of the proportions of a monospaced face, which gives it a mechanical rhythm nothing else quite has.
• Syne: Bonjour Monde. Deliberately unstable across its weights, which is a feature for identity work and a problem for anything else.
• Alfa Slab One and Ultra: fat slabs in the nineteenth-century advertising tradition. Both are used on this site's own masthead, one letter each.

Monospaced: five where the columns have to line up

• JetBrains Mono: drawn with an increased x-height and taller lowercase specifically to reduce eye movement when reading code for hours.
• IBM Plex Mono: the monospaced member of the Plex family, so it matches the sans and the serif exactly.
• Fira Code: Fira Mono plus programming ligatures, which some readers find indispensable and others switch off immediately.
• Source Code Pro: Paul D. Hunt for Adobe. Conservative, unambiguous, and the safest default in the group.
• Syne Mono: Bonjour Monde. Idiosyncratic rather than practical; it sets every figure, caption and label on this site.

Free, and reading the licence before the download

The best fonts for graphic designers are useless if the licence does not permit the use. Three terms account for nearly every problem.

Open Font Licence covers every face named above. It permits commercial use, embedding, modification and redistribution, with one real condition: a modified version may not keep the original reserved name. That condition is the one people break.

Free for personal use is not free. It is a demonstration copy, and using it on anything a client pays for is a licence breach regardless of where the file was downloaded. A very large proportion of the display faces on free catalogue sites carry these terms, and the terms line sits one line below the download button, where it is the easiest thing on the page to miss.

Desktop, web and application licences are separate purchases in commercial families. Buying the desktop licence and then serving the web font is the commercial breach that happens most often, and it is trivially detectable from the outside.

The licensing guide works through all three in full, including what happens to a licence when a client, an agency and a printer are all handling the same file.

Where a face is described above as free, it means the Open Font Licence specifically. Where a display face is only free for personal use, this reference says so and links to the terms rather than to the file: see the display catalogue.

Using the list

The best fonts for graphic designers are the ones picked in that order: the group first, then the face, then the licence. Choosing the face first is how a project ends up with a display face in its body copy and a licence problem in its invoice. Once two faces are chosen, the pairing bench will show whether they can stand next to each other at the sizes they will actually be used at, and type in practice covers what to do when they cannot.