❮ Blog
20 Brilliant But Obscure Free Fonts (They’re Not On Google Fonts)
Andrew Wilshere
Founder & Lead Coach
22nd August 2021
Image credit: Egor Belozerov
A few weeks ago we featured our selection of the most underrated serifs, sans-serifs, and display typefaces on Google Fonts.
But there’s an entire universe of type design out there, and we have to look beyond mainstream sites to find some of the most high-quality, original, and characterful free fonts.
In this blog post, we’ve curated 20 of our favourites!
1. Le Murmure
Designer: Jérémy Landes, Velvetyne
Description: Originally created for design agency Murmure, this display font has calligraphic details but no serifs. It has won multiple industry awards, including a Certificate of Excellence of the Type Directors’ Club.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
2. Moche
Designer: Pépite Collectif
Description: This is a wide, reverse contrast sans-serif font, and is provided in light, regular, and bold weights. (Reverse contrast means that the horizontal strokes in each letter are thicker than the vertical strokes.)
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use, or pay what you want
3. Cooper Hewitt
Designer: Chester Jenkins
Description: Created for the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York City, this bold, confident typeface has a full range of weights, ranging from thin to heavy. It’s suitable for both display and body text.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
4. Imposible
Designer: Rodrigo Fuenzalida, fragTYPE
Description: This mind-bending display font was designed in 2021 for the annual 36 Days of Type challenge.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
5. Violet Sans
Designer: Violet Office
Description: Developed as the in-house typeface for brand design studio Violet Office, this elegant sans-serif is influenced by the design classic Eurostile, as well as contemporary neo-grotesks. Available in a single weight, it’s suitable for both display and body text.
6. Ambidexter
Designer: Egor Belozerov, Paratype
Description: Ambidexter is a quirky but sophisticated display typeface, with calligraphic flourishes and extreme stroke contrast.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
7. Zarathustra
Designer: Georges Lemmen (1908 original), Lorène Ceccon (revival)
Description: A serif typeface originally designed for typesetting Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, this digital revival is suitable for both display and body text use, owing to its low stroke contrast.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
8. Gidole
Designer: Andreas Larsen
Description: This design is an alternative to the popular sans-serif, DIN. It’s available in regular weight, with another regular weight in an alternative, rounded style.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
9. Bluu Next
Designer: Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Velvetyne
Description: An eccentric, angular serif, this font is available in bold weight, as well as an extremely elegant and distinctive bold italic. It’s best suited to display use.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
10. Young Serif
Designer: Bastien Sozeau, Noir Blanc Rouge
Description: This old-style serif was initially inspired by fonts like Plantin Infant and ITC Italian Old Style. It features soft, rounded serifs, and generous, friendly letterforms.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
11. Savate
Designer: Wech, Velvetyne
Description: Savate is inspired by hand-lettering found in the streets of Paris. Full of character, this reverse-contrast sans-serif has both regular and italic weights. It’s most suitable for display use.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
12. Ribes
Designer: Luigi Gorlero, Collletttivo
Description: Channelling 1950s styling, this sans-serif features extreme reverse contrast, but with normal contrast on certain letters. Combined with an upright, geometric construction, it’s an exceptionally eccentric, energetic design.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
13. Redaction
Designer: Jeremy Mickel
Description: This unique typeface family was commissioned for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Its fundamental letterforms are reminiscent of Times New Roman, but notches are cut into each letter.
There are five additional styles, each in regular, italic, and bold. The styles become progressively more abstracted and pixellated, referencing the distortion of text as it is faxed, photocopied, and scanned.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
14. Optician Sans
Designers: ANTI Hamar, Fábio Duarte Martins
Description: Optician Sans is multi-award-winning typeface based on the letterforms used in opticians’ eye charts. It contains many alternates for different letters. Featuring all-uppercase letters, it’s suitable for display use.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
15. Metropolis
Designers: Chris Simpson
Description: Inspired by contemporary geometric sans-serifs, Metropolis is especially useful as an alternative to the popular font Proxima Nova. As well as having a wide range of weights, it also has a very tall x-height, meaning it remains very legible at small sizes.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
16. Helmet Neue
Designer: Carl Enlund
Description: Helmet Neue is a bulky neo-grotesk with exceptionally tall x-height. Available in regular weight, it’s suitable for both display and body text use.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
17. Happy Times
Designer: Lucas Le Bihan, Velvetyne
Description: This edgy body text font is another take on Times New Roman, featuring angled serifs, flared terminals, and unusual stroke contrast. It’s available in regular, italic, and bold weights.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
18. Basteleur
Designer: Keussel, Velvetyne
Description: Basteleur melds medieval and Cooper Black, evoking both ancient and modern. Its extremely rounded, voluptuous letterforms make the font especially suitable for display use in less “serious” projects.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
19. Apfel Grotezk
Designer: Luigi Gorlero, Collletttivo
Description: Inspired by both geometric sans-serifs and neo-grotesks, Apfel Grotezk is full of character. It has very low stroke contrast, and includes both regular and bold weights. Its intensity and stylisation make it best suited to display use. It also includes a “brukt” weight, with gaps inside each letter to reduce the volume of ink used when printing.
Licence: Free for both personal and commercial use
20. Pilowlava
Designers: Anton Moglia, Jérémy Landes, Velvetyne
Description: Partly inspired by the ideas of twentieth-century Swiss designer Armin Hofmann, Pilowlava is a font that “seeks a balance between viscous energy and controlled geometry”, according to its creators. It is visually stunning but difficult to read, meaning this is a treat best saved for experimental projects that demand something out of the ordinary.
Note: We don’t link to sites that lack a valid SSL certificate. For this reason, we have re-hosted some of the fonts featured in this article on our own server, for you to download securely. In these cases the original source is still credited, just not linked to.
We have also re-hosted font files where they were originally hosted on the developer site GitHub, since some users may find it difficult to figure out how to download the fonts from there.
Disclaimer: The licensing information in this article is provided in good faith. However, because the typefaces featured come from a wide range of sources, we recommend checking each font’s licence in detail, especially before making modifications, or using them in commercial projects.
Acknowledgements: Our thanks to all the talented designers who release their work under free-use licences. Special thanks to the open-source font foundries Velvetyne and Collletttivo, whose libraries feature in this article.
Want to learn about typography?
Baseline is a free design bootcamp with 100% in-house course materials. You can start at the beginning or check out the typography assignments to get a feel for things.
Prefer to subscribe?
RSS/XML Feed
Been considering a design course?
All of our course materials have been created in-house by expert educators. They’re available, in full, for free.
We don’t ask for your email address, or make you create an account.