Design your way

Many people are using sans-serif for display text on various projects and documents. It is essential for these serifs to have a high resolution, as lower resolution fonts can disappear and become unreadable at smaller screen sizes.

One of these popular sans-serif fonts is Calibri. Designed by the Dutch designer Luc de Groot, Calibri was first chosen by Microsoft as a part of their Windows Vista font library, but it has stuck around since then and is still one of the most commonly used fonts, especially in Microsoft projects. In this article, we take a look at the best fonts similar to Calibri.

The sans-serif was designed as a newer alternative to fonts like Times New Roman or Arial, which were the default text fonts by then. The best feature about Calibri is that it is visible at larger and smaller sizes, and it features a sloped form with handwriting features, which makes it a very modern sans-serif.

Also, the font offers support for a wide array of languages, and it supports characters from Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets. The font Calibri takes full advantage of the Open Type formatting. There are also many ligatures and text figures, as well as 20 indices, and some various stylistic sets. All this makes it one of the more complete fonts. Some features, however, are still unsupported by Office, like the true small caps, all-caps spacing, which can be accessed by Adobe programs. Here are the best fonts similar to Calibri.

Fonts Similar to Calibri

Droid Sans

Droid Sans was developed by Steve Matteson, an American designer, and released in 2009. While this font is not very appropriate as a body text font, it can still have some other uses where it can act as an alternative to Calibri. Its lack of italics makes it inappropriate for text font.

Cantarell

Designed as a project of a few graduation candidates from the Department of Typography at the University of Reading, Cantarell is a very modern and humanist sans-serif that has many good qualities to be an alternative for Calibri as an on-screen font. Its best use is for various webpages as a body text, especially for Android devices.

Open Sans

As we already know, Open Sans is one of the more popular and versatile fonts in the whole Google library, as it can do pretty much everything. Designed by Steve Matteson, again, this font uses a large x-height and apertures on lettering, which makes it perfect for usage as a body text font, and also very legible at smaller screen sizes and on all screens.

It features an italic version and is a part of the humanist sans-serif sphere. First released in 2011, Open Sans offers its users five weights to choose from, and each of those weights has an italic version, so there are really 10 versions to choose from.

Trebuchet MS

This is one of the older fonts on this list, as it stems from the year of 1996, when it was designed by Vincent Connare, and it was commissioned by Microsoft. Since then, it has become an important part of the Microsoft library. The name of the font is interesting: it is named after the medieval siege weapon, trebuchet. On the front side of things, though, this one is very good for longer texts, as well as for various design needs, such as spreadsheet designs and more. It is one of those fonts similar to Calibri that can work in various situations.

Poiret One

Poiret One belongs to those fonts similar to Calibri that has an artistic quality to it. It is a geometric grotesque that has a quality of Art Deco and constructivism, and it exudes elegance and simplicity at the same time. As a geometric grotesque, it is largely based on geometric shapes with elegant, stylish lines and curves. All these qualities make it perfect for sings, labels, various shirt designs, titles, headlines, and any other graphical design needs.

As a stylistic font, it can be very beneficial where a bit of style is needed. That is especially true in cases where such a body text is desired. It also features support for all-caps, and it can be used to add some elegance to your projects, but it can still make the project stand out.

Myriad

Featured primarily by Adobe programs, Myriad was designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for general purposes. This means that it is quite neutral, which makes it perfect for a large variety of uses. It is one of those fonts similar to Calibri that can fit right in anywhere.

Most notably, Myriad has been in use by Apple since 2017, when it replaced Apple Garamond as the default Apple font, and that makes it a very popular and well-known font. It has plenty of qualities that make it a good alternative for Calibri.

Alégre Sans

Next on the list of fonts similar to Calibri is Alegre Sans, a sans-serif font that is especially useful for display purposes, such as headings and for larger sizes. It is an all-caps font, which makes it slightly inappropriate for use as a body text font, but as a headline font, this font is perfect. You can use it now for your projects as an alternative to Calibri for headings.

Raleway

This elegant sans-serif typeface is primarily intended as a large-sized font, therefore it is mainly suitable for headings. It was first available only as a one-weight font, and it was designed by Matt McInerney, but was later improved and 2 additional weights were added in 2012 by developers Pablo Impallari and Rodrigo Fuenzalida.

Fira Sans

Next up is Fira Sans, a font that was designed primarily with Mozilla Firefox in mind, but was later very popular that it is now used in other projects as well. The best feature of this font is that it is highly legible in various situations, regardless of screen quality. There are 3 widths available for this font, each of them has an italic style as well.

Whitney

Whitney is a humanist typeface, and is one of those sans-serif fonts similar to Calibri that can add a very functional quality to the project. It was primarily designed as a font for the Whitney Museum in New York, its use has been spread over other various uses subsequently. It is good for editorial use, as well as for other means, making it quite a complete package.

FF Unit

The FF Unit font (FontFont is its full name) is the work of a co-production between the German designer Erik Spiekermann and American designer Christian Schwartz. The font has 14 different weights, which makes it a complete package for various uses. Mainly, it is best for smaller text and editorial purposes, but can work with small capitals and much more.

Seravek

Designed and released in 2007, this font was designed by Eric Olson, and was meant to be a very neutral font. It succeeds in that quest, as it is very appropriate for many uses and in many instances.

Fort

Jeremy Mickel released this font in 2012 through his foundry, and it is a mixture of grotesque and geometric fonts, which makes for a unique combination.

FFCocon

FF Cocon is a perfect font if you are looking for one that is great at both larger and smaller sizes. With two weights offered, the FF Cocon is a great alternative to Calibri.