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Best Sans Serif Font Packages Under $200
As we explored in Type Selection: Beyond the Look of the Letter, quality fonts can come in a wide variety of price points, even within the same typeface design. Much of this is due to the variety of features a font can include. This means that you can still get a well-made family for a reasonable price, particularly if you won’t make use of lots of weights and widths, or extras like small caps and alternate glyphs, and only need basic American and Western European language support.
With that in mind, here are some of our favorite sans serif font packages that cost 200 USD/EUR or less. Most of these products contain the most basic version of the typeface available but all are in OpenType format (read more about the Offc fonts) and include at least a regular and bold weight. They are also all typeface designs we can confidently recommend.
Read more about pricing and features in Type Selection: Beyond the Look of the Letter »
The family that became FF Meta was first called PT55, an economical typeface made for easy reading at small sizes created for the West German Post Office in 1985. Erik Spiekermann later improved and expanded his design to include more weights and styles, and prepared its release as FF Meta, one of the first and truly foundational members of the early FontFont library. As desktop publishing... Read More
On the way back to the airport from the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, Albert-Jan Pool and Erik Spiekermann discussed Pool’s prospects, Spiekermann knowing that his friend’s employer had just gone out of business. He suggested that if Pool wanted to make some money in type design, that he take a closer... Read More
FF Dax is without doubt Hans Reichel’s magnum opus. The design is a contemporary streamlined sans in three widths: normal, wide, and condensed. Suprisingly, FF Dax Condensed was the first to be released, in 1995. The concept behind the typeface was to combine the clarity of a condensed Futura with a more humanist touch. The result is a space saving and legible typeface of timeless quality. The... Read More
FF Cocon’s designer, Evert Bloemsma (1958–2005) described it as a “serious typeface.” Despite first impressions, the description holds up well. Since its 2001 release, FF Cocon has been used in an astoundingly wide variety of design applications. At large sizes, FF Cocon works as a display face, with beautiful detailing. And at small sizes, it remains surprisingly readable. The lowercase... Read More
Xavier Dupré’s FF Yoga mixes the harshness of a blackletter with the balanced rhythm and round shapes of the Renaissance Roman. Its sturdy serifs are a good choice for body text; They also serve as an effective headline face given their subtly chiseled counters. FF Yoga Sans is a contemporary alternative to the quintessential humanist sans (Gill Sans) and a steady companion to FF Yoga... Read More
FF Kievit explores the synthesis of the sans serif form to the structure and proportions of a traditional Renaissance Roman such as Garamond or Granjon. Work began on the typeface in 1995 when Mike Abbink was a student at Art Center in California. The family spans nine weights and includes small caps, true italics, and multiple figure sets – everything necessary for creating sophisticated... Read More
FF Dagny is a spare sans serif drawn in the “grotesk” style. In 2002, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) changed from broadsheet to tabloid format. The switch accompanied a major change in DN’s journalism, editing and design. Mario García of García Media had just redesigned DN two years previously in 2000. Pangea design’s Creative Director, Örjan Nordling, who had worked with... Read More
Mike Abbink’s initial concept with FF Milo was to create a compact sans with very short ascenders and decenders. This resulted in a versatile typeface that’s well suited to magazine and newspaper typography. The typeface was named after a resilient grain, hinting at its ability to serve as a design staple. In later releases the design was expanded upon with FF... Read More
FF Fago is the quintessential corporate typeface, a result of many years of work within the challenges and requirements of complex corporate design projects. The family offers five finely balanced weights across three widths, enough for virtually any conceivable application. Its various widths were carefully planned and drawn to complement and combine with each other. Aside from the impressive... Read More
In 1983, D. Stempel AG redesigned the famous Helvetica typeface for the digital age, creating Neue Helvetica for Linotype: a self-contained font family. Today, this family consists of 51 different font weights. It’s original numbering system for the weight designations came from Adrian Frutiger’s numbering system for the Univers family. The basic font weight, “Neue Helvetica Roman”, is at the... Read More
According to designer David Farey, "Cachet is a monospaced, monostroke typeface -- that isn't." Why the sleight of hand? Typefaces that are limited to a single character and stroke width suffer in terms of legibility. Farey's goal in drawing Cachet was to create a typeface that gives the illusion of monospacing, while delivering a subliminal dose of reader-friendliness.At first glance, Cachet... Read More
ITC Legacy® was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and... Read More