5 Cool Fonts You Don’t Want to Miss

In the spirit of giving, we’ve scoured the internet to bring you five cool, free display fonts for you to enjoy. These display fonts are modern, uber hip, and would be great as focal points in typographic treatments, 3D typography, gig posters, and other text-related media. Make sure to check each artist’s usage guidelines, as some fonts may be free for personal, but not commercial, use.

First off, what’s a display font?

In the traditional (manual) printing world, the term display fonts was used to refer to the process by which large typefaces were created–they lack ink traps, a component of smaller typefaces. Display type was the variation of a font that would be used at very large sizes–in advertisements, on billboards, and other applications. Because this manual process of creating type has disappeared with the digital age, display type no longer refers to a process; it is often synonymous with ornamental typefaces and is used when speaking of fonts that are intended to be used for logotypes, ads, headings, and in instances in which only a small portion of type is needed. Display fonts are not intended to be used in full paragraphs or long pieces of text. Because of this, type artists have a lot of room to really let their creativity take charge when it comes to designing display fonts. Read on to see the results.

GEIST RND // frede

Geist RND is a display font by Frederik Frede, a German-based designer who works with artists and musicians designing t-shirts, album art, fonts, and more. Geist is a tribute to mod, funk, hipster style. It’s big, bulky, thick, in-your-face but elusive. 3D renderings of this typeface would be killer.

Strenuous // Larabie

An oldie but a goodie, Strenuous Black is a display font by artist Ray Larabie, who founded and continues to operate two type foundries full-time after quitting his job as Art Director at a video game company in 2004. In addition to the Strenuous font family, Larabie is responsible for popular fonts like Amienne, Neuropol X, Korataki, Sinzano, and Coolvetica, a free display font that builds off Helvetica.

Often referred to as “superbad,” Strenuous continues to maintain its funk despite first appearing on the scene in 2001.

Spin Cycle

Designed by Jess Latham of Blue Vinyl, Spin Cycle is a free display font. It is described as an experimental unicase-sans serif typeface, and certain lowercase characters have a significant left or right lean to them, lending an element of surprise and flow to the font.

Public Gothic

Described by design firm Antrepo A2591 as “a little industrial, little vintage, little condensed, little bold,” the Public Gothic font family includes PB Square, PB Vintage, PB Circular, and PB Federal. It hit audiences everywhere in October and has experienced great success thus far. Public Gothic is a versatile, strong font. Its variations are not part of your typical font family: along with the rounded/square options, you also get a distressed version of each (as pictured in the image above). Antrepo definitely designed this one with its target audience in mind–something designers of display fonts should take into consideration more often!

Mod

One can’t write a post about cool fonts without including the font that epitomizes the subject: MOD. The MOD font comes from Font Fabric, an independent Bulgarian type foundry operated by designer Svetoslav Simov. Since coming on the scene in late 2008, Font Fabric has produced some incredible typefaces, including vector types (meant for AI or other SVG software) and other experimental font formats. It’s got a handful of other free fonts, so check them out. We hope to see much more from these guys!