Graphic designers, illustrators and web designers need to constantly stay updated about the ongoing trends in their fields; more so than any other profession, because they deal with elements that constantly keep changing, redefining and reinventing themselves. There is always something new on the market and if you aren’t aware of it as a designer, your designs can go obsolete or become irrelevant to the modern context of graphics and style. One such important element is typography. There are constantly new styles of fonts that keep surfacing each year. They look fresh and help designers create banners, ads, logos or even content pieces for their clients in the best manner possible. For the same reason, it becomes important for having a wide range of free fonts that are relevant and new to have that edge over other competitors. This is a list of 25 newest free fonts for 2020 that you should be making use of:

1. Void:

Void is a brand new free font that has a creative design. The font is available in multiple weights ranging from thin to bold. It can be used for any and all creative projects. The characters have a tall height and the font Is condensed. It works well for any minimal design project.

Choose fonts that enhance your brand, and customize with different sizes, font weights, colors, and more. Font Presets Select a designer-made font combination preset, or create your own to quickly keep font styles consistent across your design. Archive of freely downloadable fonts. Browse by alphabetical listing, by style, by author or by popularity.

2. Loves:

Love is a classy free font. It is a sans serif font that looks simple yet classy. The font is made with precision and it is ideal for designing website headers, titles and logos. It feels premium and carved to perfection which makes it ideal for lifestyle and fashion brands. Loves comes with a lot of alternate characters as well.

3. Nanotech:

Nanotech is a great free font that looks clean and professional. The font is available in regular as well as bold weights. This font can be used for many design projects but they look best for designing heading and titles. You can use this font for free for personal use. Moreover, it can also be used for business cards, magazine layouts, product design, large-scale artwork and business cards. To download the free font you need to provide your first name, last name and email address. You can also preview the font with your content in a test box they have on the website.

4. Nevrada:

Hotel names and goodies generally have the finest use of good typography. The font they choose is always elegant and decorative that attracts customers instantly. Nevrada is a similar free font that can be used for designing badges, logos and signage for hotels and luxury brands. Each character of this font has certain elegance and flair associated with them. This elegant font is available for free personal use.

5. Ocean:

Ocean is a modern all-caps free font that has a unique creative design. It is an ideal display font for your creative projects that need trendy designs to stand out. This font is available in four different weights from light to bold. Moreover, this font is absolutely free to be used for commercial projects as well. It looks very digital and robotic aesthetically and hence can be used for a technical brand’s logo, or even to promote a digital marketing webinar.

6. Quacker:

Quacker is a creative sans serif font that has a retro-vintage design. It fits seamlessly for various kinds of logos and label designs. This font has alternative characters as well as support for multiple languages. It is free for personal use only.

7. Monday Vacation:

Many times, a designer has one font that he/she feels certain about using, however finding the right pair of font to pair with this main font is often time-consuming and annoying. Monday Vacation understands this dilemma and provides a font duo that goes extremely well with each other. This pack has two fonts – one handwriting script and another is a bold sans-serif font. They pair well together. It is an ideal font for branding, or making typography based t-shirts and other clothing apparel.

8. Giveny:

Giveny is an ideal font for designing logos for premium luxury brands. The font itself has a simple and elegant design which enhances its professional look. The highlighting characteristics of this font are the relatively low contrast given to the strokes and the slightly boxed shapes for otherwise round characters. It is a blend of optical balance and pure geometry. The font is also ideal for quotes, greeting cards, stationary, posters as well as designer titles, art quote and blog headers. You can enjoy of this fonts offerings using their free version, but their premium versions also allows you to make use of this font in multiple languages and illustrations.

9. Railey:

Railey is a gorgeous modern handwritten font that reflects the happy, light-hearted character that instantly reminds the viewer of their childhood or their children. It is ideal for designing greeting cards as well as social media posts. This font can also work great in print for baby products or in a logo for baby product brands.

10. Thunderbold:

Thunderbold is one of the most unique fonts that has a stylish design. It is relevant and useful for various logo and badges design for modern businesses. This font has uppercase as well as lowercase characters. Moreover, it also has support for numbers and symbols. This font can be used for any creative typographic project, posters, headlines, greeting cards, magazines, logos, t-shirt design and much more. It is a font that looks energetic and alive and would be ideal for any brand that wants to portray that about their brand.

11. NeonAbsolute:

NeonAbsolute is a creative pair font that has one script font combined with one sans-serif font. Both these fonts have design inspiration from the 1980s retro neon signs. It is ideal for any techno-fest banners and promotions as well as symbol for any party-wear brand. The font can also be used for futuristic games.

12. BournBon Grostesque:

This free font is most suitable for designing badges and labels for lifestyle and fashion products. It has a thick and appealing character design that works best when you want to make a statement. This font would easily captivate the audience to read and understand what is written, and hence it can be used in headers of an important content piece of used as the company’s logo font as well.

13. Peace Sans:

If you need a big bold font for designing appealing titles and headings for your website, Peace Sans is your ideal free font. You can also use it for your social media posts and poster designs. Peace Sans is a modern font which also has glyphs and multilingual support.

14. Vigrand:

Vigrand is an impressive free font that has vintage script design. It is an elegant font that has support for lowercase and uppercase letters as well as stylish ornaments. This is an ideal font to add charm to any design project. The font has 5 level alternates and 6 styles – regular, regular rough, regular aged, bold, bold aged and bold rough. It is available for free for personal use.

15. Zolanti:

Zolanti is a free font that is going to be loved by all brush font lovers. It has a unique set of letters which features handwritten brush designs. Bloons tower defense 4 unblockeddefinitely not a game site game. It is ideal for website header design and poster design as well. The font comes with both uppercase and lowercase characters. It is ideal for greeting cards, invitation cards, packaging, magazines, advertising and so much more.

16. AldoSans:

AldoSans is a modern font that works great for designing projects. This font includes three different fonts that feature geometric designs. All the fonts are available in lower and uppercase. This font is free to use for commercial use as well. The three different fonts provides the designer with a lot of permutations and combinations to make different kind of typography designs. All the fonts are available in different weights – Italic, Regular and Bold. Moreover, this font has multilingual support which is rare for free fonts. This font can be used for creating logos, magazine layouts, headers, large-scale artwork as well as business cards.

17. RumbleBrave:

RumbleBrave is a stylish free font. It has a retro-vintage inspired design. The logo is ideal for label and logo design. It supports uppercase and lowercase characters as well. This is a brush script and a display serif font by Alit Design. The font also has glyphs, number case and multilingual characters. This font is ideal for coffee labels, logotype design, classic wedding concepts and more.

18. Michalina:

Michalina is an ideal free font that comes with calligraphy lettering design. It is perfect for designing greeting cards and invitations as well as social media posts and book cover designs. The font is available for free for personal use. This beautiful script font is classy, elegant and has a modern look with a handwritten touch.

19. Deliverance:

Deliverance is one of the best free fonts when it comes to script fonts. This is a beautiful script font that has appealing hand lettering design. It has both uppercase and lowercase letters. The font is ideal for website headers, greeting cards and social media designs. It would look good for any beauty branding, posters, magazines, cosmetics, look books and merchandise as well.

20. Spartan MB:

You need more than one font when it comes to a professional project. For an effective design you most of the times need to pair two or three fonts. For this reason, knowing about some font families is very important. They include multiple fonts and each font comes in various styles and weights. Spartan delivers all of this. It has a simple sans-serif letter design and has seven different weights you can use for free for commercial projects as well.

21. Apex Mk3:

ApexMK3 is an ideal free font if you are looking for a font for poster design or website header design requirement. This font has a bold geometric design which makes it visually appealing and ideal for headings. It is a free to use font for personal as well as commercial use.

22. ADCA:

ADCA is a modern font that has a bold and stylish design. It’s thick character designs makes it the ideal typeface for posters, banners, titles and headings. ADCA is an impressive geometric font that comes with uppercase, lowercase, symbols and numerals. This font is also multilingual. Moreover, it is free to be used for personal and commercial use both.

23. Gilroy Typefamily:

Gilroy Typefamily is a geometric font family that comes in 20 weights, 10 straight and rest are it’s matching italics. It also has light and extra bold weights. This font has been designed with some powerful open-type features in mind. For each weight you have support for fractions, tabular figures, ligatures, arrows and more. The font is ideal for display and graphic design applications.

24. Quiapo:

Quapo is a great brush typeface that was inspired by Jeepney signs that were hanged or displayed behind the windshield of Jeepneys and other public transports around Manila and other cities within Philippines. It is free for both commercial and personal use.

25. Thinoo:

Thinoo is a new clean and modern free sans serif font family that has bold and thin weights. It also has uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols and punctuations. This font works great on resumes, websites, logos, branding materials, posters and photography as well. It is free to use for personal as well as commercial applications.

These are the 25 newest free fonts for 2020 that you should try out today! All of these fonts cater to more than one purpose, and can be super helpful for you to explore the world of typography if you are a beginner. Some of the fonts present on this list are truly mesmerizing and free to use for commercial use as well. It can be a great place to start with your initial orders to establish a name for yourself in the market. Make use of these fonts for different requirements, or practicing and perfecting the art of typography and font pairing.

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Thierry Blancpain is a brand and interaction designer at Informal Inquiry in New York City and co-founder of Grilli Type, a Swiss type foundry. While this article is generally applicable to all web fonts, Grilli Type fonts are used throughout as examples of the concepts, particularly those demonstrating OpenType features.

Using your own fonts instead of system fonts is getting easier, but it’s still an evolving field. We’ll go over the different types of font formats and cover tips and best practices for them in this post. We’ll also dive into more in-depth features for those of you who want to level up and aim to perfect the craft with advanced concepts and considerations when using web fonts. In the end, you’ll hopefully feel equipped not only to put web fonts to use but to get the most out of them.

Here we go!

Font Formats

When you purchase web fonts licensing, you receive a package of font files that typically include at least some of the following formats:

• Embedded OpenType (EOT):EOT is a legacy format developed by Microsoft. Older Internet Explorer versions require EOT to render your web fonts. EOT is often served uncompressed so, if you don’t require browser support of the likes of IE8 or below, then you’re better off leaving it out.
• TrueType (TTF):TTF is a font format developed by Microsoft and Apple in the 1980s. Modern TTF files are also called TrueType OpenType fonts. TTF can be useful for extending support to some older browsers, especially on mobile, if you need it.
• Web Open Font Format (WOFF):WOFF was developed in 2009 as a wrapper format for TrueType and OpenType fonts. It compresses the files and is supported by all modern browsers.
• Web Open Font Format 2 (WOFF2):WOFF2 is an update to the original WOFF format. Developed by Google, this is considered the best format of the bunch because it offers smaller file sizes and better performance for modern browsers that support it.

If you are mostly targeting users with modern browsers, you can get away with a progressive method of using @font-face that only serves WOFF and WOFF2 formats. These offer the best compression and allow you to deal with fewer files in your code. And if a user’s machine is so old that it doesn’t support either of these formats, it may be better to just serve them a system font for performance reasons, anyway.

If you want to expand support as wide as possible, then add EOT and TTF files to the mix. SVG fonts have also been traditionally used for expanding browser support but, at Grilli Type, we don’t offer SVG fonts anymore as they bring with them a number of downsides. Google Chrome for example has even completely removed support for the format.

Embedding Web Fonts

We make use of @font-face to include fonts in CSS.

Here’s the deepest level of support, including all of the font file formats we’ve discussed so far:

We can trim things down quite a bit if we’re only aiming to support modern browsers:

Once the font has been declared and defined, we can put it to use on our elements. For example:

Hosting Web Fonts

One of the most flexible ways to load web fonts is to self-host them. That means that you host the files on your own server and your fonts will always be available when a visitor comes to your website without a third-party dependency. Neither tracking codes nor JavaScript is generally required to load self-hosted font files. Many small type foundries offer fonts as a direct download so they can be self-hosted and at Grilli Type, we are convinced it’s the best way to serve fonts.

While some type foundries offer self-hosting (both with and without cumbersome restrictions and requirements), others only offer hosted solutions, meaning they host the files on your behalf. Some of the well-known ones include Hoefler & Co., Font Bureau, and Typotheque. Font Bureau and Typotheque offer their fonts in both ways at different price points.

Make sure you know how a type foundry’s web fonts are offered before you buy licensing, because the difference in hosting and the terms of use can affect how they are implemented. Get what makes the most sense for you and fits your needs, and make sure you’re using them legally and according to the foundry’s licensing agreement.

Advanced Typographic Features

Let’s take a look at some of the more advanced features of web fonts.

Spacing and Kerning

There are two settings inside font files that define the space between characters:

1. letter-spacing: This is defined as side bearings on the left and right side of each character
2. font-kerning: This refers to specific adjustments between two characters

Spacing cannot be turned off at all, because otherwise the text rendering engine (your browser) wouldn’t know what to do with these letters. Kerning, on the other hand, is turned off by default in browsers and has to be turned on by you in your CSS.

It’s easier to control kerning than you might think! Here’s how to activate it across all browsers that support it:

If you don’t use a something like Autoprefixer to help manage browser support in CSS, then you’ll want to manually write out the browser vendor prefixes for this setting to extend browser support to older versions:

Advanced OpenType Features

We just discussed how to use the font-feature-settings attribute to control kerning, but it can also be used to control other available OpenType feature in your web fonts. The number of supported features has been growing over time and the CSS-Tricks almanac is a good place to reference what is possible with OpenType.

OpenType features are really exciting because they open up a bunch of possibilities for controlling fonts without having to serve multiple files to get the same effect. At the same time, it’s worth noting that the features an OpenType font file supports is up to the font designer and that not all fonts support the same features.

To illustrate how advanced OpenType features can be chained together, the following code would turn on the numeric characters of an OpenType-enabled font that supports both old-style numerals (onum) and proportional numerals (pnum), plus enable kerning and activate a specific stylistic set included in the font:

The font-feature-settings attribute can be used to activate stylistic alternates, discretionary ligatures, different types of figures available in a font, small caps, and other handy things. Typofonderie has a nice overview of these advanced features, including examples.

Because font-feature-settings is used to set many OpenType features at once, it’s not possible to define a single setting differently as the other choices will not be inherited. All of the features would need to be defined again to change the settings for child elements.

Letting Spacing and Word Spacing

CSS has long supported the letter-spacing and word-spacing attributes. When used correctly, both provide a fair amount of control over two very important aspects of how your type will look.

As with all things typography, you’ll want to learn how to evaluate different options both functionally and visually and make decisions based on your impression. Different contexts may call for different spacing needs.

At smaller sizes, most typefaces will benefit from a little extra spacing between characters and words. In larger contexts, like headings, typefaces may benefit from more narrow spacing. In either case, the right decisions require attention and your best judgment based on the outcomes.

I’ve found that letter-spacing and word-spacing both work best using em units for the values. That allows the spacing to adjust fluidly based on the font size of the element they are applied to. The following example will give your content a little more room to breathe at smaller font sizes:

Font Rendering

Using type on screens brings up important questions about how they are rendered. Fonts are usually designed on about a 1000 units tall grid—or even larger—but then are displayed at something like a 16px font size. In an interplay between device, screen, and software, this reduction in resolution and fidelity requires some smarts to make small type legible and good-looking. Again, be observant, test in many browsers, and use your best judgment to put the best methods to use to increase legibility.

Hinting

Every operating system treats fonts differently from one another. In MacOS, the smarts are in the operating system (and thus can evolve over time), while the fonts themselves can be dumb. Historically, on Windows, the smarts were supposed to be included in the font software, and the system was supposed to use those smarts to decide how a font should be rendered at different sizes.

Those smarts are called hinting. Hinting information embedded in the font files can tell a computer that the two stems of an “H” character are supposed to have the same line width, or that the space above and below the crossbar should stay about equal at smaller sizes.

Hinting is a very complex and complicated topic, but the important takeaway is that the same font at the same size might render differently, even on the same computer depending on many factors, including the screen, the browser, and even the font and background color.

Microsoft provides a guide on the topic of hinting. Even though it was initially released in 1997, it’s still a good read because it so thoroughly explores the topic.

Font Smoothing

While hinting information included in the font files is mostly being ignored on MacOS, specific browsers offer some additional control over font rendering.

Using these CSS properties leads to sharper, thinner text rendering on MacOS and iOS. But beware: this can also lead to rendering problems, especially if you’re already using a thin font or font weight.

Both antialiased and grayscale are mainly useful to balance the rendering of fonts when using light text on dark backgrounds, as they would otherwise get rendered quite a bit bolder.

The font-smoothing property and its values are not on the path to become a standard CSS feature, so use it with caution and perhaps only in contexts where you know you need to target a specific browser and context.

Caution: OptimizeLegibility

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We often come across this attribute when troubleshooting font usage on Grilli Type customer websites:

Among other things, it activates kerning. That was very useful at some point, but is not needed anymore (as shown above). In addition to kerning, it also activates all kinds of ligatures, including extravagant ones that may be present in the font files.

Although there are some use cases for this, do not use this feature if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing with it. Chance are you don’t need it in the first place.

Web Font Resources

If you’re ready to dive deeper into web fonts, here are a handful of recommended resources you can use to learn more:

• Clagnut’s OpenType CSS Sandbox by Richard Rutter: A great place to test out OpenType features and easily put together your required CSS code.
• Webfont Handbook by Bram Stein: This is the most in-depth e-book you can possibly read on web fonts, font rendering, and font performance.
• Copy Paste Character: This is a great website that allows you to access pretty much any special character you might ever use.
• Using @font-face by CSS-Tricks: This article includes snippets for declaring web fonts based on varying browser support.

Advanced Web Font Considerations

For those who are ready to level up to more advanced techniques, here are even more considerations to take into account:

Uploading Licensed Fonts to Github

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If you commit a project to a public repo and use font files that you have licensed, please make sure that either the fonts or the directory that contains them is included in your .gitignore file so that they do not get uploaded. This will prevent others from taking and using your font files, and it can prevent you from breaking any terms of use for licensed fonts that usually have usage and sharing restrictions.

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Font Loading Tactics

Loading web fonts can be as easy as simply using @font-face but that doesn’t necessarily offer the best possible performance. For example, it opens up the possibility of a Flash Of Unstyled Text (FOUT) which might be considered poor UX in some cases. Zach Leatherman’s “A Comprehensive Guide to Font Loading Strategies” covers that and methods to improve the loading experience that will make you and your users very happy.

Base64-Encoded Font Files

In some rare instances, encoding your fonts as base64 inside your CSS will be a good idea but, generally, it is not—and, not to mention, you might break your font’s licensing agreement in the process. Be sure to proceed with a lot of caution and read up on your font’s terms of use when considering base64.

CSS Text Decoration

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The W3C is working on a draft for new controls for text decoration, mainly dealing with how to make underlining text better and easier in CSS. This is not yet usable across all browsers, but have a look!

Variable Fonts

In 2017, the OpenType fonts specification 1.8.2 was released, allowing for what is called Variable Fonts. This new version of OpenType will allow for the inclusion of multiple font styles into a single font file, reducing server requests and web font file sizes. Depending on the type designer’s choices, it may also allow for the use of arbitrary weights in between existing weights and widths of fonts, among other things. Axis Praxis is a good website to play around with some existing test fonts – you will need a recent version of Safari or Chrome to do so, though.

Wrapping Up

We covered a lot in this article! Hopefully, now you have a good understanding of the different font files out there, how to work with them, and all the amazing and powerful ways fonts can be styled using both tried and true methods and cutting-edge features.