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WEBSITE ESSENTIALS

17 best free fonts: a curated selection

Jenna Romano

Best Free Fonts


To help you find the perfect font for your web design, we’ve handpicked a selection of the best free fonts available to download. This list is full of high-quality serif, sans serif, display and web-safe fonts for all of your design needs.


It’s hardly an overstatement to say that typography is at the very core of most creative projects, from branding to website design. More often than not, using one particular typeface over the other can truly elevate your message, making your design shine with aesthetically pleasing visuals.


While typography is a complex artform, demanding meticulous attention to weight, spacing and color, your choice of font is the first essential step in crafting the desired look.



17 best free fonts you can start using





01. Restora: Old style serif


Restora is a serif type family created by Nasir Udin. It includes 16 fonts, two of which are free - Restora Extra Light and Restora Thin Italic.


Inspired by old-style roman serifs, the Restora type family is complete with different ligatures, swashes, and alternates, allowing for a unique and diverse use of typography. There are also small caps and old-style numerals, as well as many other features, that amount to a total of over 700 glyphs per style.


Learn more: Professional fonts


Best free fonts: Restora


02. Misto Font: Display sans serif


Designed by Katerina Korolevtseva, Misto font is a tribute to her Ukrainian hometown, Slavutych. Its sharp contrasts in stroke width reference the town’s postmodernist architecture and utopian ideals. It’s a multilingual display sans serif, supporting both Latin and Cyrillic.


When using this free font, Katerina encourages you to share your designs on your Instagram account with the hashtag # mistofont.



Best free fonts: Misto Font


03. Okta Neue: Sans serif


Okta Neue is a geometric grotesk typeface designed by Eugene Tantsurin and distributed by Groteskly Yours. The full typeface consists of 22 styles, two of which are free to download - Ultra Light and Black Italic.

This sans serif has a neutral look, so it can be used across various applications and needs, and works well in different font pairings. It's a multilingual font that supports Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew, and has a total of 1,293 characters per each style.



Best free fonts: Okta Neue


04. Argesta: Serif


Designed by independent typeface foundry Atipo, Argesta is made up of nine different styles, one of which is available for free download (the Display Regular Font). As a token of appreciation for the hard work that went into its design, sharing news of the font via Twitter or Facebook is required in order to complete its download.


In addition, for those interested in purchasing the entire font family, Atipo allows users to name the price they see fit, starting with €15. The Argesta font comes in both desktop and webfont files, which also makes it an ideal font to choose for your website.



Best free fonts: Argesta


05. Disket Mono: Display monospaced


Disket Mono is a display monospaced typeface designed by Mariano Diez. Its design is modular and grid-based. The designer behind the font attributes his typographical inspiration to geometry and modernist architecture. The typeface consists of two weights, regular and bold, with 614 characters in each.


Disket Mono is also a multilingual font, supporting a total of 20 languages. The Cyrillic set for this typeface was designed by Denis Ignatov.



Best free fonts: Disket Mono


06. Butler: Serif


Butler is a type family of seven weights, ranging from ultra light to black, all free for personal and commercial use. Created by Fabian De Smet and released for download on his design portfolio website, the typeface contains both regular and stencil variations.


A serif typeface with a modern flare, Butler was inspired by the classic Bodoni family, and the stencil version took to the Dala Floda family as its muse. It’s a high-contrast font, making it a great fit for large titles or posters. The Butler family offers a total of 334 characters, including ligatures, figures, added glyphs and more. It’s available both as a webfont and in desktop files.


Best free fonts: Butler


07. Mattone: Sans serif


Designed by Nunzio Mazzaferro and distributed by open source type foundry Collletttivo, Mattone is a sans serif font which stands out as highly visible. It pairs wide curves and straight-cut endings, resulting in a bold look.


Mattone is a free font that’s available for download in a single, regular weight. It comes with extended Latin glyphs for additional language support, so that you can use it when building a multilingual website. This is a flexible website typography example, whether you're looking to create a business website or offer one of the best websites in your field.



Best free fonts: Mattone

08. Bagnard Sans: Sans serif


Bagnard Sans Regular was designed by Doug Thomas, Chris Fodge and May Kim. It’s a sans serif version of a different free font called Bagnard, designed by Sebastien Sanfilippo and inspired by the graffiti writing of an unnamed Napoleonic prisoner of war.


The font is licensed as an open source font, which means it’s available for modification, contribution or download on its GitHub page.



Best free fonts: Bagnard Sans


09. Noah: Sans serif


Noah is a family of 72 fonts by Fontfabric, four of which are free - Noah Regular, Noah Italic, Noah Bold and Noah Bold Italic. Noah is a geometric sans serif with sharp details, making it well-suited for a variety of typographic needs.


This multilingual font also supports Extended Latin and Cyrillic scripts, and can be used across over 130 languages.



Best free fonts: Noah


10. Young Serif: Serif


Created by Bastien Sozeau and distributed by creative studio Uplaod, Young Serif is available in a single, medium weight. The font consists of 348 glyphs and supports many different languages. This free font features heavy letterforms with bracketed serifs, and interesting axis tilts for some of its letters (notice the lowercase E, for example).


The typeface is licensed as open source. Once you’ve downloaded Young Serif (or any other font), you can easily upload the font to your website and incorporate it into your web design.



Best free fonts: Young Serif


11. Poppins: Sans serif


Poppins is a geometric sans serif type family of nine weights ranging from thin to black, with matching italics for each. The typeface was designed by Johnny Pinhorn and Ninad Kale for the Indian Type Foundry as a multilingual font, supporting both the Latin and Devanagari writing systems.


One of the best fonts for logo design, Poppins’ clean, minimalist aesthetic is based on geometric forms and perfect circles.



Best free fonts: Poppins


12. League Mono: Sans serif monospaced


This open source typeface designed by Tyler Finck for The League of Moveable Type includes eight weights - from ultra light to extra bold. It’s available in both desktop and webfont files.


Monospaced fonts are unique in that each of their characters takes up the same amount of horizontal space. Traditionally, monospaced fonts have been used in typewriters and computer code. Modern monospaced typefaces such as League Mono give off a clean, minimalistic feel and can be used for various design purposes.



Best free fonts: League Mono


13. Codec Pro: Sans serif


Codec Pro is a geometric sans serif type family of 22 styles, with two free fonts - regular and italic. It was designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Francesco Canovaro and Andrea Tartarelli for Zetafonts Italian Type Foundry.


With over 1,700 glyphs, the typeface supports Latic, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu scripts. It also includes ligatures and stylistic alternate sets for a more dynamic feel.



Best free fonts: Codec Pro


14. Gotu: Sans serif


With expressive curves and rounded strokes, this free font is nuanced and sophisticated. As a multilingual font supporting both Latin and Devanagari, it takes inspiration from the traditional calligraphy and hand lettering of the Devanagari language.


Learn more: Handwriting fonts


Gotu was designed by Sarang Kulkarni and Kailash Malviya and distributed by Ek Type. It’s licensed as an open source font, and is available in a single style. The font includes many features, such as language and numeral alternates, ligatures, and more.



Best free fonts: Gotu


15. Libre Baskerville: Serif


Based on the 1941 Baskerville font by the American Type Founder, Libre Baskerville is a web typeface optimized for body texts appearing on screen, making it a good choice for blog posts and other lengthy texts. The original font dates even further back, created by John Baskerville in the 1750s.


The Libre Baskerville type family designed by Pablo Impallari and Rodrigo Fuenzalida consists of three free fonts - regular, italic and bold - and covers 103 Latin languages.



Best free fonts: Libre Baskerville


16. Metropolis: Sans serif


This geometrical sans serif typeface designed by Chris Simpson comes with nine font weights and an italic version for each. Its clean and minimalistic design makes it clearly legible in different font sizes, from paragraph text to titles.


This open source typeface is distributed under public domain and can be also found on GitHub.



Best free fonts: Metropolis


17. Woodland: Serif


Woodland is a serif typeface with six weights, whose bold and ultralight versions are offered for free for personal use. It features strong, squared serifs and wide terminals. Several noteworthy touches give it added personality, such as a rounded crossbar in the lowercase E.


As with all fonts by Pangram Pangram Foundry, Woodland is free for personal use. However, note that if you’re working on a commercial project for clients, a presentation or a logo design, you’re required to purchase a license on the foundry’s website.



Best free fonts: Woodland

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