Design your way

Even if you are working with basically no budget on your graphic design or web design project, you can still find some really amazing fonts free for commercial use out there with a bit of work.

The most useful royalty free fonts are legible and come with a choice of different weights as well as any special characters you might need.

They shouldn’t need much or any tweaking to get the right kerning and tracking.

These fonts are ready for you to use on your project and are easy to adapt to whatever you need. It can be hard to find good free fonts out in the wilds of the internet, however. There’s just so many options, many of them with conditions attached that aren’t initially advertised.

Here is a collection of some of the best free fonts for commercial use. These are some of the top free fonts you can find on the web today. A lot of them have excellent pedigrees, created by major design firms and professional graphic designers around the world. Having no budget to purchase fonts doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get some great free fonts to use for your project.

Aileron

This versatile sans serif free font was created by Sora Sagano, a designer with Tipotype. This font looks like a neo-grotesque that sits somewhere between the look of Helvetica and the look of Univers.

This font was designed around creating a strong sense of visual comfort. It can be found in 16 weight, ranging from ultralight to black.

Aganè

This is great commercial use font for anything you want to be readable at an angle. It was originally designed for wayfinding signs by the Swiss graphic, UI, and type designer Danilo De Marco. It was inspired by FF Transit by Erik Spiekermann, Frutiger by Adrian Frutiger, and Noorda Font by Bob Noorda. It is free for both personal and commercial use.

Aleo

Aleo is a stylish yet readable font. Designed by Alessio Laiso, a designer at IBM Dublin, this font has semi-rounded details that combine pleasantly with its overall sleek letterforms.

This font has six styles, with the light, regular, and bold weights and italics in all of weights. This font was published under the SIL Open Font License and can be modified, used, or shared freely as long as you’re not going to sell the font files.

Amatic SC

Designed by Vernon Adams, then revised by Ben Nathan and Thomas Jockin, this free font is a hand-drawn font that works very well for smaller bits of text. It has a naïve look that has made it increasingly popular. Over 2, 400, 00 websites use it.

Arabella

This calligraphy font looks great for any text you want to look elegant and striking. It works very well for signatures, headings, wedding invitations, logos, labels, posters, t-shirts, badges, and almost anything else that you want to make a statement.

Argon

Argon is a free to use font that has a design that can be bith modern or retro depending on how you use it. Every letter is composed of three lines that fit together like an elegant puzzle. It is only available in capital letters.

Audrey

Audrey is an elegant royalty free font designed by Cristina Pagnotta. It’s named after Audrey Hepburn and is meant to evoke the actress’ legendary elegance. Its sweeping curves and straight lines come together for striking effect. Audrey comes in three weights, normal, oblique, and italic.

You’ll notice that the designer’s profile will only mention the normal and oblique weight, but the ZIP archive includes the italic weight as well. You can use Audrey for free for personal and commercial use in print. You’ll need to obtain a license if you want to use it online.

Bauru

Created by Pier Paulo, a Brazilian art director and illustrator, Bauru is a great choice to evoke a retro and nostalgic feel.

BEYNO

This uppercase free to use font has a hypermodern and interesting style. It will catch the eye of any reader who sees it. Use it to great effect for headlines and posters. BEYNO was made by Fabian Korn.

Brela

Brela was created for editorial design by Makarska Studio, a Spanish creative agency. It’s a very legible font at all sizes with a large x-height. You can use it small text or as a large bold headline font. It is abailel in regular and bold weights.

Brotherhood

This is a hand-written, calligraphy inspired free font that is excellent for classical, striking titles or short bits of text that you want to stand out.

Butler

This is a free font created by Fabian De Smet. It’s a serif font inspired by Dala Floda and the Bodoni family. The designer wanted to create a modern serif font. This font offers a lot of options. It has 334 characters, seven regular weights, and seven stencil weights.

There are also ligatures, fractions, and text figures. It can work with a number of different languages because there are numerous additional glyphs. This is a great free to use font for titles on posters, books, or anything else. It looks both very fancy and very modern

Charming

Charming is a hand drawn font that resembles American vintage folk lettering. It works great for signs, logos, ads, posters, and quotes that you want to highlight. It comes in OpenType format and supports Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek characters. It is free for both commercial and personal use.

Cheque

Originally the student project of Mirela Belova of Fontfabric, this free font is a great choice for headlines that you want to have a vintage, geometric look.

Chivo

Chivo works great for headlines and other text that you want to really capture readers’ attention. It is a grotesque typeface that has an elegant confidence. This free font comes from Héctor Gatti and the Omnibus-Type Team. It comes in four weights and matching italics.

Cormorant

Inspired by the font Garamond, this font is a serif font. It was designed, hand-drawn, and produced by Christian Thalmann. He describes his work as having “scandalously small counters, razor-sharp serifs, dangerously smooth curves, and flamboyantly tall accents”.

It work very well for larger text, like titles and large poster text. It also looks very good in print and on screens. Surprisingly, it is still legible at smaller sizes.

Cornerstone

Interestingly, Cornerstone is one of those free to use fonts that started out as a school project by Zac Freeland. It grew into a free typeface with a non-nonsense look that can be useful for a lot of different kinds of projects.

Crimson Text

Crimson Text was developed by Sebastian Kosch, a German-born, Toronto-based designer. He was heavily influences by the works of Jonathan Hoefler, Jan Tschichold, and Robert Slimbach.

It’s a Garamond-like font, created for book production, and has an older look to it. It is a nice sophisticated alternative to a lot of other older-looking Garamond-derived fonts. It comes in all the basic weight options, with a very expressive italic. It looks good even when paired with more modern sans serif fonts.

Curely — Free Typeface

This free font is a handmade decorative font with a distinctively feminine style. Use it for titles, posters, or any text that you want to look both cute and bold. It is only available in capital letters.

Cute Punk

Vibrant, geometric, and youthful, this modern–styled handwriting font was created by Slou, a designer from Bratislava, Slovakia.

Fenix

Fenix was designed by Fernando Díaz, from the at Uruguayan type foundry TipoType. It was inspired by calligraphy. It works for both titles and body text, with a pleasant rhythm created by its strong serifs and rough strokes. Don’t be afraid to use it in longer passages.

Futuracha

Fina

This free font is ultra-thin and modern. The capital letters have an almost art deco feel to them, with dots and points accented the clean thin lines. The lowercase letters are sleeker.

Hamurz

Hamurz has numerous curling and wavy shapes. It is a highly creative font that is freely available for both personal and commercial use.

HK Grotesk Hanken

This san serif free to use font was inspired by classic grotesque fonts like Trade gothic, Akzidenz Grotesk, Univers, and Gill Sans. It was designed to be a unique and friendly font that works for smaller text. It was created by the Hanken Design Co. Recently, it has expanded the number of language it supports, adding in Cyrillic characters for use in Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian.

Ikaros

Ikaros is a sleekly modern sans serif font created by Matt Ellis. It has a pleasant but fun minimalism that works for body text of many sizes and larger text as well.

JAKARTA typeface

If you want an ultramodern look, this font is a great option. It is a very lightweight font that looks great for graphic design and logo design.

Jura

Designed by Ed Merrirt, a UK based designer, Jura has rounded wedge-based serifs. It is an elegant typeface that looks very good at larger sizes, yet can still be read at smaller sizes.

League Gothic

This font is a condensed sans-serif free font. It was inspired by Alternate Gothic #1, a classic typeface that was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company in 1903. This modern version was created by The League of Movable Type. It’s open source and has had contributions from Dannci, Micah Rich, and Tyler Finck.

Libre Baskerville

Libre Baskerville is a web font that has been optimized for body text. The best size for it is 16pt. . This font is an open source project that is led by Impallari Type, which is a type design foundry from Rosario, Argentina.

It was inspired by the 1941 American Type Founder’s Baskerville. The Libre Baskerville font has a taller x-height however, with wider counters and a touch less contrast. This means it reads very well on a screen

Long shot

Smart and modern, Long Shot is a free to use font with a sharp and fierce style. It looks great for banners, headlines, and posters. While it might seem long an uppercase only font, it includes some great lowercase letters, as well.

Lora

Lora is a free font based off of calligraphy, created in 2011for the type foundry Cyreal. A Cyrillic extension for the font was added in 2013. This font has brushed curves and driving fonts. It has a very contemporary and balanced style. It comes with four weights, regular, bold, italic, and bold italic. Lora is optimized for web use, but also looks good in print.

LOT

This stylized block font comes from the type foundry FontFabric. It is a big, bold choice that’s great for headlines and posters.

Luthier

This is a royalty free font that can be used in a number of diverse ways. It has a very intellectual look that can be used for headlines and body text alike. It’s the work of Adrià Gómez, a designer based in Barcelona. It has sharp serifs and high contrast. This free font comes in two weights and comes with italics.

Mightype

Originally, this was not one of the commercial free fonts, but the designer AF Studio opted to release it separate from its original commercial package for free use.

The unique shape of this font’s design were made using traditional media, including brushes, drawing pens, marker, and pencils. There are some limitations to this font’s use, all of which are described in the publisher Creative Market’s SimpleLicense. It is still among the commercial use fonts you can use for most projects, however.

Moabhoers Typeface

Fun and grungy, this free font is an all capital font. This is a great vintage style that creates some eye-catching text.

Nickainley

This free font is a great choice if you want a typeface that looks like handwriting. It has a classical and vintage look in its uppercase and lowercase letters. This font was made by Seniors Studio, an Indonesian agency.

Noto Sans

Designed by google, Noto Sans is a family of royalty free fonts. It supports over 100 writing systems and 8000 languages with hundreds of thousands of characters. This free font family is meant to be visually unified across multiple languages.

All characters have compatible stroke thickness and heights. Noto Sans was derived from the Droid font and has a serif font version, Noto Serif. It includes regular, bold, italic, and bold italic styles.

Olesia Font

Oleisa is a script typeface that has extra loops and curling swashes on letters like E and b. this creates a charming and care-free look that may be just the thing your project needs. It is difficult to read at smaller sizes.

ONE DAY

Simplistic and modern, this all-capital font was designed in one day, hence the name. It’s geometric lines come together to create striking lines that look good for titles and other short pieces of text that you want to stand out.

Pacifico

This free to use font was inspired by American 1950s surf culture. It was created by Vernon Adams and is an open source font.

Panama Light

Fun and sleek, Panama Light is a modern sans serif free font created by Adrien Coquet. It’s great for ads or titles and pairs well with big, bold colors. You can also pay for the Panama Bold at the designer’s website.

Paralines

This free font looks retrofuturistic yet modern and minimalistic. It was derived from both retro design and modern fonts. It’s a great choice for headlines and logos that you want to evoke an old school sci-fi feel. It’s very legible and only comes in capital letters, making it unsuitable for body text.

Playfair Display

Inspired by late 18^th Century European Enlightenment designs and the work type designer john Baskerville, this font is a serif typeface. The letters have delicate hairlines, mimicking the effect of pointed steel pens. It’s very distinct among copyright free fonts. It’s both readable and has an old-fashioned look.

September

This commercial free font has a sleek look that works for larger and smaller text. September is a font based on old-school knuckle tattoos. It is available for free in a number of styles and weights.

Shadows into Light

Designed by Kimberly Geswein, this free font has clean characters and nicely rounded edges. It adds a personal touch. It is only available in one style.

Slabo

This incredibly popular font (currently number one on Google Fonts) was designed by John Hudson, the co-founder of Tiro Typeworks foundry. Slabo is actually a collection of free commercial fonts designed specifically for the web.

So far, there’s Slabo 27px and Slabo 13px. These fotns have been fine-turned for use at those pixel sizes and look absolutely amazing. There’s a blocky look to their ligatures that ass a modern twist to their serif style.

Soda Fountain

Soda Fountain was inspired by the signs found in 1950s diners. It has an unmistakable vintage style. It only comes in uppercase letters and works best for headlines. It adds a vintage, smooth feel to whatever text you use it for. You can use this font freely for both commercial and personal projects.

Source Sans Pro

This free font to use has an impressive pedigree. It was created by the principal designer at Adobe, Paul D. Hunt, and was published by Google. This is a sans serif font that was made for user interfaces. It’s versatile enough that it also works well for long chunks of text. Every letter is as simple as possible.

There are only a few small tweaks and additions that differentiate different letter shapes. You can get it in both a regular weight and italic. This is another font published under the SIL Open Font License, allowing for use, modification, and sharing so long as users aren’t trying to sell the font files. You can also get this font’s serif cousin, Source Serif Pro.

Streetwear

This sporty retro font is the work of the Indonesian studio Artimasa.

Raleway

Designed by Matt McInterney, who previously worked at Pentagram, Raelway is a san-serif free font with neo-groesque look. It has standard and discretionary ligatures and a nice set of diacritics. It includes lining and old-style numerals. Raelway is available in single thin weight. There is also a geometric-inspired alternate available.

Timber

This free font has an amazing vintage rustic look. All the lines in the letters connect perfectly, so don’t worry about them looking jagged. The uppercase and lowercase letters look notably different and you may want to try both out.

Titillium Web

Titillium began as the work of a students at Italy’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino. Every year, a dozen students at the school work on the font. They develop and fix issues in it, then they request that all designers who use the font in their projects email them examples of the typeface in use. They use these to continue refining the project.