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Best Logo Fonts to Use in Your Designs

Find a great logo font (free or commercial) from one of 6 categories: Retro, Classic, Playful, Elegant, Geometric and Modern.

Brand Design
October 3, 2023
13
min

Table of Contents

The font you use can be the decisive factor that will define the success of your logo. Finding the perfect logo for your logo design is an important task and we’re here to help you find it, and offer some backstory about the best fonts for logo design.

Typography is of major importance in graphic design; every typeface and font has its own character and spirit it brings to the overall creation. Depending on the type of business and brand image you want to build, you need fitting typography. Here are a few categories of fonts you might want to look into.

Essentially, fonts can be serif, sans serif, slab serif, script, geometric, etc., but instead on the technical side, we sorted them by aesthetic characteristics and style.

Vintage and retro

Vintage fonts are suitable if you want a classy design inspired by a certain era, or the theme of your business requires it. Still, retro doesn’t have to mean it won’t look contemporary, cause many fonts can combine the best of both worlds.

1.Mullingar (purchase only)

Mullingar is a display typeface inspired by letters used in old advertisements and sign-painting culture. The creators added a modern touch to keep it relevant. It is built from a bold and blocky base, unique serif combinations, clean and smooth curves, and sharp edges.

It heavily reminds of retro sign painting and rustic architecture, making it perfect for bold signage and logo designs, as well as other uses.

2.Frontage Condensed Typeface (purchase only)

Frontage Condensed is extremely noticeable due to its colorful facade signage. It is a three-dimensional font with narrowly spaced letterforms. It’s got a retro vibe, something reminiscent of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s very easy to remember the old cinema signs on Sunset Boulevard when you see this font.

3.Ephemera Kingsford (free for personal use)

This new vintage typeface is adapted from real collectible tins and cans. The designer had a passion for collecting old tin packaging and adapted this digital typeface from those references. It has a very strong Wild West characteristic and retro quality, and it is a fitting font for your logo if you’re an alcohol beverage manufacturer or a craft beer bar.

4.Rekina (purchase only)

Rekina Vintage Bold Script is a serif font inspired by vintage vehicle ads. It has very wide and bold lettering with discretionary ligatures. The creators made it with a few uses in mind: it’s a great choice for logo design and branding purposes.

5.Modesto (free)

This font family by Jim Parkinson is directly inspired by hand-painted typography and the logos of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The designer didn’t plan to create the Modesto Family, but he kept releasing 23 fonts in a time period of twelve years: from 2000 to 2012.

6.Alfa Slab One (free)

This font created by designer JM Solé is a slab serif font inspired by the Six-lines Pica Egyptian. It possesses extreme stem weight, big serifs, more stem contrast, and gradual terminals with a single serif.

7.Zorus Serif (free)

This old-timey serif typeface has a vintage elegance to it. It is perfect for use for a vintage-style cafe, magazine, or skincare products.

8.Sackers Gothic (purchase only)

Sackers Gothic is part of a larger Sackers collection of fonts. It is inspired by engraved stationery and social cards by Gary Sackers, a Charlotte, North Carolina intaglio printer. Sackers’ typefaces are initially made into photo-set type, and digitized and released in the late 1980s by Compugraphic.

9.Baisteach (free for personal use)

Baisteach is an all-caps vintage serif inspired from the early 1900’s typography often used in sign paintings, packaging labels, and advertisements. It is an elegant retro typeface consisting of sharp serifs and clean edges, as well as an extensive list of glyphs whose intricate form makes it suitable for logos and logotypes.

10.Architectural (free)

This typeface is clean and retro, reminiscent of the Art Deco movement. It has a strict construct and each letter has a unique building, which is exactly why it carries that name.

11.Akura Popo (free)

Another vintage and condensed serif font you can easily imagine on a theme restaurant logo or on a beverage label. It’s great for logotypes, as well as a display font. Or any use you might have for a font that brings a tough and authentic spirit, really.

Classic

In this sublist, you’ll find fonts that have been prominently featured in many famous and timeless logos and graphic design examples throughout the years. From free fonts to some of the most intricately designed typefaces, these fonts are the royalty of typography.

12.Bodoni (free)

Bodoni makes a perfect logo font, and the creators of the Vogue and Clavin Klein logos, among others, were well aware of that. Bodoni typeface has five noticeable characteristics: a dramatic difference between the thick and thin design elements, thin serifs, a vertical axis, horizontal stress, and small aperture. It is commonly used in fashion logos.

13.Didot (purchase only)

The Didot font family is an old and unique one, and designer Firmin Didot started working on it in 1784. With the help of his brother Pierre, they designed and cut the letters for this linotype font, and it was on the cover of Voltaire’s La Henriade. Even though it dates from the 18th century, it’s still a prominent font, now digitized and available for classy logo designs. A famous logo today that uses this typeface is Harper’s Bazaar.

14.Butler (free)

Butler is a serif typeface coming from the same font style as Bodoni. It’s actually a mixture of Bodoni and Dala Floda. The main goal the creators had was to bring some modernism to serif fonts by working on the curves of classical serif fonts and add an extra stencil family.

15.Helvetica (free for personal use)

This typeface is one of the most popular and widely used in the world. Helvetica has clean, no-nonsense shapes. It was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland and originally called Neue Haas Grotesk. In 1960 the name was changed to Helvetica, an adaptation of Helvetia, which is the Latin name for Switzerland.

Its simplicity and clean, sans serif design, makes it a popular choice for many world-renowned brands, such as Fendi, Nestle, and American Airlines.

16.Abril Fatface (free)

Abril Fatface is a modern variation inspired by classic Didone styles. It has both a neutral and strong presence for grabbing attention and readability. Its direct influence comes from advertising posters in 19th century Britain and France. It also supports more than 50 languages.

17. Bauhaus (free for personal use)

The Bauhaus font family consists of four fonts. As the name suggests, it was created for printed material of the famous Bauhaus German school of design and architecture. Two designers, Edward Benguiat and Victor Caruso were commissioned to create a typeface in 1925. The result was a unique geometric typeface that has no serifs or other adornments. Other refined versions of the ITC Bauhaus support more languages and have additional glyphs to support Central European and other languages.

18.Avenir (purchase only)

Designer Adrian Frutiger looked for inspiration to both the past and the future when creating the Avenir typeface. He wanted to reinterpret the geometric sans serif fonts from the early 20th century but infuse 21st-century aesthetics.

This wonderfully simple, yet rich font is used for branding purposes by LG Electronics, Japan Airlines, the City of Amsterdam, and Scottish water, just to name a few.

19.Proxima Nova (free)

The Proxima Nova font family by designer Mark Simonson is a complete reworking of Proxima Sans. It consists of 42 fonts separated in three widths: Proxima Nova, Proxima Nova Condensed, and Proxima Nova Extra Condensed. It is intended to bridge the gap between typefaces like Futura and Akzidenz Grotesk and combine humanistic proportions with a somewhat geometric appearance. Proxima Nova is a great font family to choose for your logo design if you want to communicate professionalism and accessibility: it’s both clean and classy, and down-to-earth and natural.

20.Serifa (free for personal use)

Serifa is another typeface designed by the iconic Adrian Frutiger. It’s a slab serif typeface with a sturdy character. It is loosely based on the Univers font family, also by Frutiger, and other older slab serif fonts. It offers legibility that heavier slab serif and serif fonts lack, but it still manages to be comfortable and elegant.

21.Brandon Grotesque Regular (purchase only)

Brandon Grotesque breaches influence from geometric style sans serif typefaces from the 1920s and 30s. These fonts were mainly based on geometric forms that were optically corrected for legibility. It has a small x-height and restrained forms, that give this font a noticeable elegance.

22.Apple Garamond (not available)

Garamond is a serif typeface that Apple used as part of their brand identity for more than 20 years. It is based on the ITC Garamond font and condensed to 80% of its usual width. Apple owns this font and it’s impossible to buy the license, but you can use ITC Garamond as a substitute, or try to condense it. A similar font family is Cardinal Fruit, so you can opt for that one instead.

23.Yeseva One (free)

Yeseva One is a feminine and elegant serif type. Yeseva’s name is from the phrase “Yes, Eva.” As a sign of complete agreement between a man and a woman, the designer Jovanny Lemonad writes in the Google Fonts description. It is a beautiful choice for a lighter logo that still has subtle and circular serifs, both in the uppercase and lowercase letters.

Modern

Sometimes, the right font for your logo is not a legendary and old one. It can be newer, more suitable for the digital era, with a bold and noticeable minimal look. Or a modern rendition based on a classic typeface revamped in a more minimalist take. Here are some modern fonts that might inspire you to go for a fresher and simpler look of your logo.

24.Nano (free)

Nano looks like a distant descendant of Bauhaus from the future. It is a minimal, futuristic lowercase font with an organic look, due to its circular shapes. It is the perfect font for logo design, branding, and minimalist packaging.

25.Pulsar (free)

Pulsar is an all uppercase, serif display font, with elegant and smooth curves. It has a very futuristic look and it vaguely resembles the Star Trek font, so if you want a poignant and modernist logo, it’s a good choice for your design.

26.Atami (free)

Atami is characterized by wide sans serif characters with descending modern corners. It also comes with stencil base glyphs and display base glyphs. Its unique modular design makes it a perfect font for logotypes.

27.Fogie (free for personal use)

Fogie is a modern serif font family that features 10 fonts and many ligatures and alternates. It has a classy, feminine and retro vibe, but the designers managed to give it a modern and simple look that is perfect for display design and logotypes.

28.Luxia (free)

Luxia is a modern sans serif typeface based on vintage Didone fonts. Its elegant flourishes and sharp and sophisticated corners give it a rich and distinctive look, perfect for branding and logo design that is immediately recognizable.

29.Kiona (free for personal use)

The Kiona font family consists of four weights and supports foreign languages. It is modern, geometric, and minimal. Its simplicity makes for an amazing wordmark for a fashion brand or real estate company.

30.Circular STD (free for personal use)

Circular STD is a simple and modern sans serif font, that you’ve probably seen already. It’s a very popular webfont choice, used mostly for digital marketing, heading designs and logo design for digital use only.

31.Posterama (purchase only)

The Posterama designer Jim Ford calls this typeface family a “true journey through space and time”. Each Posterama family contains 7 weights from Thin to Ultra Black, in 9 distinct families. It is a versatile and unique typeface family because it has eight alternative display families and a rich collection of different glyphs. It is inspired by a whole century of futuristic elements in art, architecture, poster design, and science fiction.

32.Joyride (free)

Joyride is a sans serif typeface that is unique because of its variable width. It includes 12 fonts with a variety of styles. The uppercase letters in each of the styles are extended to allow easy customization and control of the width of each character.

33.New York (free)

New York is another typeface by Apple, but contrary to Garamond, the company made this one free for use. It is a revamped version of a 1984 font created by Susan Kare, best known for creating the Mac icons. This digital revamp of the old serif font keeps its nostalgic elements but offers a modern simplicity.

34.Neo Sans (free)

The Neo Sans typeface designer, Sebastian Lester, describes this collection as “legible without being neutral, nuanced without being fussy, and expressive without being distracting.” It has extra rounded as well as square-shaped letterforms that are easy to read and distinctive, which makes it a great font for branding projects.

Playful

Sometimes a good logo needs to include a cursive, script font, or a bold font with decorative elements. Depending on the nature of your brand, infusing some playfulness and relaxation in your designs can be a success.

35.Museo (free)

Museo takes the sans serif font definition to the edge. The font family designed by Jos Buivenga has light legibility, as well as a sturdy and low contrast design. The OpenType features in Museo Sans include ligatures, fractions, proportional, tabular lining and old-style figures.

36.Sunflower (free for personal use)

The Sunflower Serif Font is a beautiful, feminine and catchy serif font based on old-style elements. It is perfect for branding and logo design, as well as fashion, magazines, banners, as a display font, etc. It comes with uppercase and lowercase letters and multiple symbols and numbers.

37.Gentle (free for personal use)

Gentle is a cousin to Sunflower: both are created from the same creative agency and have similar inspiration starting points. It is a modern serif typeface, bold and with subtle and soft strokes. It includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols, as well as multilingual support.

38.Nicky Mikela (purchase only)

Nicky Mikela is a bold and elegant font with vintage elements. It is distinguishable because of its beautiful ligatures, alternative glyphs, and decorative elements. It is a pretty and versatile font great for the logo design for beauty, fashion or cosmetic company or retail store.

39.Bjola (purchase only)

How chunky and extra bold do you want your font to be? If the answer is “Very”, Bjola is the right font for you. This sans serif font with a free-flowing and approachable character is the perfect choice for a children’s clothing company, candy or snacks manufacturer, or maybe for your friendly coffeeshop’s branding project.

40.Silver Crown (purchase only)

Silver Crown is an ultra condensed font with a customizable length and size of the letters. It makes for a striking, flowing, and interesting look, suitable for a good brand logo. However, it might not be that easy for reading, because of the small spacing and overflowing letters.

41.Croc (purchase only)

This bold and thick wedge serif font is immediately noticeable so it’s a good choice if you want your logo to really stand out. It has a bit of a retro vibe, reminiscent of old-school ad headers, posters, and stickers. It mixes really sharp serifs and thin strokes, balancing light calligraphy with sharp architectural design.

42.Glysa (free for personal use)

The Glysa font is inspired by intricate and quirky graphic design, and it reflects the creator’s influences from art and architecture well. It displays vitality, playfulness, elegance, and a rich personality that you’d like your logo design to have.

43.Masquerade (purchase only)

Masquerade is a bold serif font created from a combination of script letters and more defined geometric shapes in other letters. It features contextual alternates, beautiful ligatures and stylistic sets with just a hint of a retro feel.

44.Arida (purchase only)

This font is dedicated to San Juan, Argentina, a city with rich vegetation. Árida takes the sharp and aggressive forms of the cacti in the desert area of Argentina with the uppercase letters, but the smaller scale looks friendly. The creator says that this font portrays the dichotomy between humans and nature.

Geometric

Geometric fonts are sharper, more defined, and not as organic and relaxed as typically serif fonts. They offer a modern, minimal look and an air of seriousness and elite look.

45.Aventa (free)

Aventa is a geometric sans serif typeface with a contemporary touch. It has a high x-height which makes it elegant and dominant. Still, it’s clean and non-intrusive, making it a good choice for professionals in accountancy or law industry.

46.Aquatico (free)

Just like water, Aquatico has a very flowing, natural, and organic feel. It is inspired by exotic sea creatures and the ocean deeps, reflected in rounded forms and geometric shapes.

47.Moonglade (free for personal use)

Moonglade is a cool, sans serif, sci-fi looking font with clean-defined lines and shapes. It’s sleek and minimalist, making for a cool and impressive font for a trendy logo.

48.Futura PT (free)

Futura is a sans serif typeface that depends on geometrical shapes representative of the Bauhaus school of designs. It has a vast collection of symbols and supports different languages. It’s available in Cyrillic, which made it a famous font in Slavic speaking countries in the 1990s.

49.Apura (not yet available)

This unique geometric font is created as a combination of two shapes: circles and squares. It’s simple, yet rich and immediately impressive. According to the designer on her Behance portfolio, it will be soon available to download.

50.Codec (free for personal use)

Codec is a geometric sans serif type system that has two coherent variant fonts built on the same base skeleton: Codec Cold and Codec Warm.

While Codec Cold emphasized geometry and gives the typeface a more constructed look, Codec Warm has open diagonal cuts and two-story letterforms that give the typeface a slightly more humanist look and a gentler, warmer text feeling.

51.Kano (free)

Kano is a simple, yet effective geometric typeface with diagonal cuts at the ends of each letter. Apart from that, it is a classic typeface with a simple and light presence.

52.Geometrica (purchase only)

This is a font family with three completely different styles based on the same font structure: Arcane, Orion, and Gravity. All three fonts are designed with the same geometric forms and stylistic elements, with a difference in the ornaments, width, and boldness.

Elegant

Some logo designs really need to immediately relay the nature of the brand, and sometimes that means the font has to be elegant and classy. Here are some of them.

53.Sophilia (purchase only)

Sophillia is a ligature serif font with a unique look and dynamic that makes it a very distinguishable one. It has a high contrast between the thin and thick elements, that lends it a lot of styles. It is a modern take on the Caslon style typeface.

54.Rosie (purchase only)

This beautiful typeface is reminiscent of the Art Deco styles of the 1920s. It possesses sophisticated curves and subtly thin lines. It is a great choice if you want a modern take on vintage poster fonts.

55.Bon Voyage (free for personal use)

Another gorgeous font by MADE Studio (also creators of Sunflower and Gentle), this time a calligraphic serif. It is simple and effective, sure to offer some feminine elegance and lightness to any logo.

56.Kaige (purchase only)

Kaige is a rounded typeface inspired by playful curves and circular forms. This lowercase font has a soft structure based on circular shapes, clean lines, and unique shapes. The creator describes it as a font that “gives the face a dynamic, sweet and friendly child-like aura, yet, in a complete paradox in itself, also lends a bold and modern feel”.

57.Le Major (purchase only)

This luxurious and vintage font belongs on a bottle of expensive perfume, or the casing of fine jewelry. Its beautifully thin and free-flowing ligatures make it a royal-looking font.

58.Chatoyer (purchase only)

Another luxurious and feminine font with a seductive appeal. Chatoyer has beautiful, thin, and rounded swashes and numerous creative ligatures and nested or overlapping caps.

59.Glamour Absolute (purchase only)

This serif font has two variations: Vintage Retro and Modern Chick. It has a “split personality” that makes it a versatile font. It has bold and rounded ligatures and defined serifs, contrary to the other fonts on this sublist. The possibility of choosing between the two different characteristics makes it a great font to experiment with in logo design.

60.Cagile (purchase only)

Cagile has a classy, but minimalistic design. It supports 17 languages and comes in 4 styles, each one with simple and intrinsic details.

61.Moccha (purchase only)

Moccha is a font duo: it consists of both a classic serif and modern sans serif version that are perfectly paired together. It also comes with 9 logo mockups that the creator gives for free, which you can alternate in Adobe Illustrator for your business’ needs.

62.Simplicite (free for personal use)

Simple and sophisticated, just as the name suggests. Simplicite is a decorative and elegant font that will look amazing on minimalist packaging and classy monochrome logos.

63.Chloe (purchase only)

Chloe brings a vintage flair and modern elegance to the table, with its contrasting lines and curved terminals. It is a versatile serif typeface full of spirit.

64.Bravery (free)

Bravery is a simple, classy, and rich font, with many characteristics, such as the circular ligatures contrasting the sharp forms and lines. It is a beautiful and completely free font. It’s only restraining attribute is that there are no lowercase letters.


Journalist turned content writer. Based in North Macedonia, aiming to be a digital nomad. Always loved to write, and found my perfect job writing about graphic design, art and creativity. A self-proclaimed film connoisseur, cook and nerd in disguise.

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