Font Examples and Tryout
Visualize some of the most popular fonts in the world within this graphic, we’ll showcase popular typefaces, allowing you to see them in action. Whether you’re seeking design inspiration or simply curious about typography, come and discover the beauty and versatility of these font examples.
Acumin is a versatile sans serif intended for a balanced and rational quality. Solidly neo-grotesque, it not only performs beautifully at display sizes, but also maintains an exceptional degree of sensitivity for text sizes.
Berthold first published Akzidenz-Grotesk in 1896. The design originates from Royal Grotesk light by Ferdinand Theinhardt who also supplied the regular, medium and bold weights. Throughout the years, Berthold has expanded this extremely popular and versatile family. AG Super was developed in 1968 by Günter Gerhard Lange and is an excellent choice for headlines. In 2001, Günter Gerhard Lange added more weights for Berthold including Super Italic and Extra Bold italic.
Original sanserif designed in 1962 for Fonderie Olive by the late Roger Excoffon. Excoffon achieves brilliant personal effects by calculated breaking of accepted design canons.
ITC Avant Garde Gothic is a font family based on the logo font used in the Avant Garde magazine. Herb Lubalin devised the logo concept and its companion headline typeface, then he and Tom Carnase, a partner in Lubalin’s design firm, worked together to transform the idea into a full-fledged typeface. The condensed fonts were drawn by Ed Benguiat in 1974, and the obliques were designed by André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt in 1977.
In drawing the Avenir® typeface, Adrian Frutiger looked to both the past and the future for inspiration. His goal was to reinterpret the geometric sans serif designs of the early part of the 20th century in a typeface that would portend aesthetics of the 21st century. He succeeded handsomely. In doing so, Frutiger added a bit of organic humanism to the design, freeing Avenir from the rigid geometric overtones of the earlier designs.
A set of square capitals developing from the interest in geometric forms stimulated by the Bauhaus, Bank Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton for ATF in 1930, the same year that Georg Trump designed City for Berthold.
John Baskerville spared no effort to create the ultimate typographic book. He prepared deep black inks and smoothed paper to show to full effect the letters that he had John Handy cut from his own brilliant designs, based on a lifetime of calligraphy and stonecutting. Punches and matrices survive at the Cambridge University Press. The present design is an accurate recutting, with particular attention to George W. Jones’ revision from the metal of Baskerville’s English (14pt) roman and italic in 1929 for Linotype & Machinery Ltd; Mergenthaler Linotype imported this design to the USA two years later.
C.H. Griffith was commissioned by the American telephone company, Bell, to design a typeface which would be particularly suited to small, compressed sentences and inferior paper quality. The font was intended for use in the company’s telephone books. Griffith had already had experience with the conception of newsprint fonts and was interested in legibility issues. In 1922 Griffith created the Legibility Group, which contained particularly legible fonts predestined for newspapers. Bell Gothic has all the typical characteristics which optimize a font’s legibility.
Morris Fuller Benton started the Bodoni revival with this version for ATF in the early years of the 20th century. We consider it the first accurate revival of a historical face for general use. Sturdy and a little mechanical in the 19th century tradition, this is the Bodoni series familiar to us all.
Carol Twombly designed this Caslon revival for Adobe in 1990, after studying Caslon’s own specimen sheets from the mid-eighteenth century. This elegant version is quite true to the source, and has been optimized for the demands of digital design and printing. Adobe Caslon? makes an excellent text font and includes just about everything needed by the discriminating typographer: small caps, Old style Figures, swash letters, alternates, ligatures, expert characters, central European characters, and a plethora of period ornaments.
Experience the precision, elegance and history of the Chalet font family. This collection of ten typefaces in three unique styles is the creative genius of acclaimed clothing designer René Albert Chalet. Originally used in his early advertising campaigns, Chalet appropriately echoes the attitude of its creator: function with flair. Modest and unpretentious yet bold and daring, Chalet’s distinctive air allows for a variety of uses ranging from text to display applications. Add modern panache to any design with the Chalet font family.
The first slab serif fonts appeared at the beginning of industrialization in Great Britain in 1820. Clarendon and Ionic became the names for this new development in England, known as English Egyptienne elsewhere in Europe. Clarendon is also the name of a particular font of this style, which, thanks to its clear, objective and timeless forms, never lost its contemporary feel. In small point sizes Clarendon is still a legible font and in larger print, its individual style attracts attention.
Oswald Bruce Cooper designed Cooper Black, an extra bold roman face, based on the forms of his earlier typeface Cooper Old Style, which appeared with Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Founders in Chicago. Copper Black was produced by Barnhart in 1922 and acquired in 1924 by the Schriftguß AG in Dresden, where it was later completed with a matching italic. Although Cooper Black appeared in the first third of the 20th century, it still looks contemporary and it can be found on storefronts in almost any city scene. The flowing outer contours create forms that are both strong and soft, making Cooper Black an extremely flexible font.
Linotype Didot™ was drawn by Adrian Frutiger in 1991, and is based on the fonts cut by Firmin Didot between 1799 and 1811. Frutiger also studied the Didot types in a book printed by the Didots in 1818, “La Henriade” by Voltaire. This beautifully drawn family is the right choice for elegant book and magazine designs, as well as advertising with a classic touch.
Dutch type designer Albert-Jan Pool created this sans FontFont between 1995 and 2009. The family has 20 weights, ranging from Light to Black in normal and condensed styles (including italics). It is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries, poster and billboards, small text, wayfinding and signage as well as web and screen design.
The Eurostile font family was designed (by Novarese and Butti in 1952) to complement the titling font, Microgramma, by offering a lowercase alphabet. Issued by the Nebiolo foundry, the rather square sans serif Eurostile became popular for display and advertising use. The linear nature of Eurostile suggests modern architecture, and its attraction is technical and functional. Eurostile is commonly misspelled Eurostyle.
German type designer Hans Reichel created this sans FontFont between 1995 and 2000. The family has 36 weights, ranging from Light to Black in Condensed, Normal, and Wide (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, book text, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries, poster and billboards, wayfinding and signage as well as web and screen design. FF Dax provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters.
American type designer Michael Abbink created this sans FontFont in 2001. The family has 9 weights, ranging from Thin to Black (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, book text, logo, branding and creative industries, small text, wayfinding and signage as well as web and screen design. FF Kievit provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super—and subscript characters.
German type designers Hannes von Döhren, Christoph Koeberlin and the FontFont Type Department created this sans FontFont in 2013. The family contains 10 weights from Hairline to Black and is ideally suited for film and TV, advertising and packaging, editorial and publishing, logo, branding, music and nightlife, software and gaming, sports as well as web and screen design. FF Mark provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, super- and subscript characters, and stylistic alternates.
American type designer Michael Abbink created this sans FontFont between 2006 and 2008. The family has 9 weights, ranging from Thin to Black (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising, packaging, book text, editorial, publishing, logo, branding, small text as well as wayfinding and signage. FF Milo provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters.
Bernd Möllenstädt’s first type design, Formata, was released in 1984. Instead of linear severity common to many sans serifs, Formata offers curved strokes and interesting details that are subtle in smaller sizes but distinguishable in larger sizes, thus, appropriate for both text and display. The family has an extensive weight range complimented by small caps, old style figures, fractions and the Euro symbol for both the normal and condensed versions. The breadth of the family makes it an excellent choice for a wide range of applications from bodies of text, office memorandum, scanning and faxing documents to attention-grabbing headlines.
This version of ITC Franklin Gothic contains a PanEuropean character set supporting Greek and Cyrillic languages, in addition to Western, Central and Eastern European languages. Customers seeking a Franklin Gothic that matches the Microsoft Windows version should select this version.
In 1968, Adrian Frutiger was commissioned to develop a sign and directional system for the new Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Though everyone thought he would want to use his successful Univers font family, Frutiger decided instead to make a new sans serif typeface that would be suitable for the specific legibility requirements of airport signage: easy recognition from the distances and angles of driving and walking. The resulting font was in accord with the modern architecture of the airport.
FS Me is about design that doesn’t patronise. People with learning disabilities are often treated as inferior by childlike design. FS Me is designed for adults, not children – a beautifully-designed font for everyone.
Its features include very subtle distinguishing elements of each letter to aid the reading and comprehension of texts, and tails, ascenders and descenders that have been extended for extra clarity.
Futura is THE prototype of a geometric or constructed linear sans serif and the font most commonly font of its kind used to date. Futura, very much influenced by the Bauhaus movement in Germany, was designed in 1927 by Paul Renner. Although being around for almost 90 years, Futura seems eternally young and fresh which also explains its continuous popularity with designers and typographers. Futura simply means efficiency and functionality documented by both its many usages as corporate type (e.g. Volkswagen, formerly IKEA, Vuitton, Shell, formerly HP, SMA and many more) as well as in various famous film projects (e.g. Kubrick, Anderson etc.). Futura’s iconic status was probably established when it walked on the moon with the Apollo 11 crew in 1969. It was used for the lettering of the plaque that was left up there.
Drawn by Tony Stan, ITC Garamond was first released in 1975 in Book and Ultra weights only. These were intended as display faces to complement existing text designs from other foundries. (In fact, many of ITC’s interpretations of traditional typefaces began as display counterparts for existing text designs.) These first weights of ITC Garamond became so popular, however, that ITC released the Light and Bold weights and a suite of condensed faces in 1977. Now, the complete ITC Garamond family features sixteen members: four weights of roman and italic in normal width and four weights of roman and italic in companion condensed versions. The family resemblance is there, but ITC Garamond’s unique provenance gives it an unmistakable, one-of-a-kind appeal.
The successful Gill Sans® was designed by the English artist and type designer Eric Gill and issued by Monotype in 1928 to 1930. The roots of Gill Sans can be traced to the typeface that Gill’s teacher, Edward Johnston, designed for the signage of the London Underground Railway in 1918. Gill´s alphabet is more classical in proportion and contains what have become known as his signature flared capital R and eyeglass lowercase g. Gill Sans is a humanist sans serif with some geometric touches in its structures. It also has a distinctly British feel. Legible and modern though sometimes cheerfully idiosyncratic, the lighter weights work for text, and the bolder weights make for compelling display typography.
Gilroy is a modern sans serif with a geometric touch. A younger brother of the original Qanelas font family. It comes in 20 weights, 10 uprights and its matching italics. The Light & ExtraBold weights are free of charge, so you can use them to your heart’s content. Designed with powerful opentype features in mind. Each weight includes extended language support (+ Cyrillic), fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures and more. Perfectly suited for graphic design and any display use. It could easily work for web, signage, corporate as well as for editorial design.
The Gotham typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000. A sans serif that shares many attributes of typography’s ‘geometric’ genus, Gotham was inspired by a style of bold capital letters that evolved outside the typographic tradition in the early twentieth century, common to lithographed posters, enamel signs, and commercial facades throughout New York City. First appearing in the pages of GQ magazine in 2001, Gotham gained international attention in 2007 when it was adopted by the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. One of the most popular and influential typefaces of our time, Gotham is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
With the name Helvetica (Latin for Swiss), this font has the objective and functional style which was associated with Swiss typography in the 1950s and 1960s. It is perfect for international correspondence: no ornament, no emotion, just clear presentation of information. Helvetica is still one of the best selling sans-serif fonts.
The Knockout typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1994. A reimagining of Hoefler’s earlier Champion Gothic headline series (1991), Knockout is an interpretation of the motley sans serifs that supplied American job printers starting in the late nineteenth century. Its thirty-two styles reference both the tall, condensed wood types used for posters, and the miniature ‘engraver’s faces’ once used for stationery. A prominent effort in the preservation of American vernacular typography, Knockout first appeared in the pages of The New York Times Magazine in 1994.
Larken is a confident serif. Designed to reflect nature, it creates a sense of natural softness and expressiveness. We pushed the concept into a usability focused direction, to work as a bold tool and beautiful communicator.
Letter Gothic font was designed by Roger Roberson for IBM sometime between 1956 and 1962. Inspired by Optima, the typeface originally had flared stems. A monospaced sans serif font designed for use on an IBM Selectric typewriter, Letter Gothic font is a good choice for tabular material.
Lucida Calligraphy is a chancery cursive script typeface family designed by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow. It is a very legible and readable typeface, designed for use on screen and in print environments. Lucida Calligraphy was originally released in one weight. It is now available in five weights, from Thin to Black. Lucida Calligraphy is part of the Lucida superfamily of fonts from Bigelow & Holmes. Lucida is highly regarded for legibility and its extensive range of type styles. The Lucida Calligraphy typeface family has a Standard character set with 255 glyphs supporting the basic range of Latin languages.
Maison is a mono-lined grotesque constructed using rigid elements to achieve a minimalist industrial feel in homage to the early twentieth century modernist design concepts.Originally created as a mono-spaced typeface family—with less optical corrections than its successor Maison Neue—Maison has been further developed to work equally in both mono-spaced and proportional alignments.
German type designer Erik Spiekermann, created this sans FontFont between 1991 and 2010. The family has 28 weights, ranging from Hairline to Black in Condensed and Normal (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, book text, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries, small text as well as web and screen design. FF Meta provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters. It comes with a complete range of figure set options—oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. As well as Latin-based languages, the typeface family also supports the Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew writing systems.
Metro Nova comprises seven weights, from ultra thin to extra black in regular proportions, and six weights as condensed designs. Each has an italic counterpart for a total of 26 fonts. The family is available as OpenType® Pro fonts, which provide for the ability to easily insert typographic features such as ligatures, fractions and alternate characters. Pro fonts also offer an extended character set to support most Central European and many Eastern European languages.
Mistral is a loose running script based directly on the handwriting of its designer, Roger Excoffon. His goal was to create a typeface with a true handwritten style, but in this case, the writing looks as though it were done with a brush or heavy felt tip.
The original Frutiger typeface was designed in the early 1970s by Adrian Frutiger and his studio for the way finding system of the Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Soon after the airport was opened, a huge demand for the typeface arose from companies wanting to employ it in other signage systems, as well as in printed matter. The Frutiger typeface came out as part of the Linotype library in 1977. Epitomizing functionality and clarity both in signage and as a bread-and-butter typeface in print, Frutiger became a modern classic.
When ITC Officina was first released in 1990, as a paired family of serif and sans serif faces in two weights with italics, it was intended as a workhorse typeface for business correspondence. But the typeface proved popular in many more areas than correspondence. Erik Spiekermann, ITC Officina’s designer: Once ITC Officina got picked up by the trendsetters to denote ‘coolness,’ it had lost its innocence. No pretending anymore that it only needed two weights for office correspondence. As a face used in magazines and advertising, it needed proper headline weights and one more weight in between the original Book and Bold.”” To add the new weights and small caps, Spiekermann collaborated with Ole Schaefer, director of typography and type design at MetaDesign. The extended ITC Officina family now includes Medium, Extra Bold, and Black weights with matching italics-all in both Sans and Serif — as well as new small caps fonts for the original Book and Bold weights.
Many typefaces are distinctive or attractive at the expense of legibility and versatility. Not so the Optima® family. Simultaneously standing out and fitting in, there are few projects or imaging environments outside of its range. Although Optima is almost always grouped with sans serif typefaces, it should be considered a serifless roman. True to its Roman heritage, Optima has wide, full-bodied characters – especially in the capitals. Only the E, F and L deviate with narrow forms. Consistent with other Zapf designs, the cap S in Optima appears slightly top-heavy with a slight tilt to the right. The M is splayed, and the N, like a serif design, has light vertical strokes. The lowercase a and g in Optima are high-legibility two-storied designs.
Palatino is the work of Hermann Zapf and became available in the late 1950s from D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt am Main. Zapf optimized Palatino’s design for legibility, producing a typeface which remained legible even on the inferior paper of the post World War II period. Zapf named the font after Giambattista Palatino, a master of scripts from the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Palatino is an Old Face font which proves that classic forms can still be used to create new typefaces.
Whether you call them slab serif, square serif, or Egyptian, you know them when you see them – sturdy, nearly monoweight designs with blunt, straight-edged serifs and a no-nonsense attitude. The Rockwell® Nova family is a fine example of this appealing and eminently usable type style. This is a design that is both robust and adaptable. Marked by the flat top-serifs on the cap A, unusual Q tail and high-legibility two-storied lowercase a, Rockwell has a bit of handmade charm that distinguishes it from the cool, more modern interpretations of the slab serif style.
Rotis is a comprehensive family group with Sans Serif, Semi Sans, Serif, and Semi Serif styles, for a total of 17 weights including italics. The four families have similar weights, heights and proportions; though the Sans is primarily monotone, the Semi Sans has swelling strokes, the Semi Serif has just a few serifs, and the Serif has serifs and strokes with mostly vertical axes. Designed by Otl Aicher for Agfa in 1989, Rotis has become something of a European zeitgeist. This highly rationalized yet intriguing type is seen everywhere, from book text to billboards.
In the early 1960s, the German Master Printers’ Association requested that a new typeface be designed and produced in identical form on both Linotype and Monotype machines so that text and technical composition would match. Walter Cunz at Stempel responded by commissioning Jan Tschichold to design a new version of Claude Garamond’s serene and classical Roman. Its bold, and particularly its italic styles are limited by the requirements of Linotype casting machines, forcing the character widths of a given letter to match between styles, giving the italic its characteristic narrow f. The family’s name is taken from Jacques Sabon, who introduced Garamond’s Romans to Frankfurt. Sabon has long been a favorite of typographers for setting book text, due to its smooth texture, and in large part because Tschichold’s book typography remains world famous.
Danish type designer Ole Søndergaard created this sans FontFont between 2000 and 2004. The family has 30 weights, ranging from Extra Light to Ultra in Condensed, Normal and Extended (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries as well as wayfinding and signage. FF Signa provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters.
Sofia Pro is a geometric sans font family who dares the modernism and the harmony of the curves. Created in 2009 and completely redesigned in 2012, it has become over time, a popular alphabet and has received many accolades from graphic industry professionals.
It has very rounded curves with very open terminals that makes this font family elegant, friendly and contemporary. Sofia Pro has been designed with a higher x-height than other fonts in its class to make tiny readability more obvious in any use situation. It will be ideal for use in small sizes such as business cards or mobile applications.
TheSans is a modern classic. A favourite for corporate design, editorial design and new media, it comes in an astounding range of widths and weights, including a large set of hairline fonts.
In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times.
The new design was supervised by Stanley Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older typeface, Plantin, as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space (always important concerns for newspapers). As the old type used by the newspaper had been called Times Old Roman,” Morison’s revision became “Times New Roman.” The Times of London debuted the new typeface in October 1932, and after one year the design was released for commercial sale.
The first cuts of Trade Gothic were designed by Jackson Burke in 1948. He continued to work on further weights and styles until 1960 while he was director of type development for Mergenthaler-Linotype in the USA. Trade Gothic does not display as much unifying family structure as other popular sans serif font families, but this dissonance adds a bit of earthy naturalism to its appeal. Trade Gothic is often seen in advertising and multimedia in combination with roman text fonts, and the condensed versions are popular in the newspaper industry for headlines.
While designing Trajan, Carol Twombly was influenced by the style of carved letters produced by the Romans during the first century AD. Twombly completed the design, adding numerals and punctuation, as well as a bolder version to allow for text emphasis. Most importantly, her interpretation of the ancient style resulted in a font family whose clarity and beauty come across in modern printed materials.
The font family Univers is one of the greatest typographic achievements of the second half of the 20th century. The family has the advantage of having a variety of weights and styles, which, even when combined, give an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. The clear, objective forms of Univers make this a legible font suitable for almost any typographic need. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry’s art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet.
The Verdana™ Family of fonts was created specifically to address the challenges of on-screen display. Designed by world renowned type designer Matthew Carter, and hand-hinted by leading hinting expert, Tom Rickner, these sans serif fonts are unique examples of type design for the computer screen. The generous width and spacing of Verdana’s characters is key to the legibility of these fonts on the screen. Despite the quality of the Verdana font family at small sizes it is at higher resolutions that the fonts are best appreciated.
Today’s digital font technology has allowed renowned font designer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf to realize a dream he first had more than fifty years ago: to create a typeface that would come very close to the freedom and liveliness of beautiful handwriting.
The basic Zapfino font family, released in 1998, consists of four alphabets with many additional stylistic alternates that can be freely mixed together to emulate the variations in handwritten text. In 2003, Zapf completed Zapfino Extra, a large expansion of the Zapfino family.