Looking for a vintage typeface to beautify your steampunk designs? Check out these Victorian vintage, sci-fi and quirky, as well as simpler fonts that will get your creative gears going.
Typography plays a big part in every design, and sometimes it’s easy to get stuck in one place trying to find the perfect font. Steampunk fonts are not exempt: there’s plenty of them, in different retro and science-fiction styles. So if you are looking for free fonts or ones that you have to buy for commercial use, this one’s for you.
Firstly, if you don’t know what steampunk is, it’s a retrofuturistic subgenre of science fiction that relies heavily on the technology and aesthetic known from and inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. It sounds like something that wouldn’t be popular in this day and age, but it’s heavily used in video games, sci-fi films, and of course, graphic design.
Without any further ado, let’s show you some steampunk fonts that will help your designs look like they’re from the past… or the future?
Vintage Victorian typefaces
The design of signage and typography in the Victorian era is the base of the steampunk style. It was a time of mechanical innovation and the discovery of new lands. Incidentally, it’s almost always the style in mind when someone says they like vintage design.
Here are some vintage fonts that look like they’re straight from a time of steamboats, trains and great human achievements.
1. The Crow (purchase only)
This retro grunge display font by Cruzine comes in eight different styles, all of them in a recognizable vintage style. Any style would make a great addition to your steampunk art, since they can be more typical Victorian, all the way to a horror grunge style. It can also make a great Halloween font.
2. Victorian fonts collection (purchase only)
This 1800s inspired layered decorative Victorian font collection comes in different styles and weights: a total of 14 fonts and an extra Victorian dingbats collection. Not only that, but you can also get it with different glyphs and it works in more than just the Latin alphabet. A complete set of victorian graphic, ornament, border & badges in OTF format is also included in the set.
3. Black Spot (purchase only)
This elegant and curvy vintage font has both uppercase and lowercase letters and would make a perfect typography choice for steampunk labels or book covers. The serif font package comes with plenty of ligatures and different deco flourishes and frames, that you can use to create a unique design.
4. Andimia Layered Fonts Family (purchase only)
From an embossed to a silver textured style alternates, the Andimia Layered fonts family has it all. It is the perfect typography to be used in packaging, as well as lettering in posters, t-shirt design and other design projects.
5. Chimera Tail (purchase only)
Chimera Tail is a decorative slab serif textured typeface that automatically makes the first and last letter of the line or sentence have long ligatures. It also includes a clean, non-textured version, and clipart of the chimera illustration that is editable in Photoshop.
6. Controwell Victorian font foundry (purchase only)
The Controwell font bundle consists of serif and handwritten fonts, beautifully elegant and classically themed. The font bundle is mostly aimed at logotypes, web design letterheads, packaging design, label design, as well as book covers.
7. Hemera II (free for personal use)
If the Hemera II font doesn’t belong on a bottle of whiskey, I don’t know what does. This high quality vintage style font boasts long and elegant ligatures, a 3D style and 27 additional glyphs that you can experiment with.
8. Letterhead typeface (purchase only)
This classic typeface is mainly intended for letterhead design, as the name implies. It comes with a vintage vector ornate. A secondary swooshy script font can be found in the foundry, that you can combine with the regular one.
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9. Stay Alive (purchase only)
The Stay Alive Typeface is heavily inspired by the Victorian style of posters and sign paintings. The designer behind it wanted to combine modern and classic typography with features that possess strong shapes, so it creates more attention for people to look more closely. It is intended for use in logo design, t-shirts, posters, labels, letterheads, book covers, and other retro and steampunk designs.
10. Classic Heritage (purchase only)
Finally, we have a Victorian font design called Classic Heritage, which also has a distinctive retro look and ornate. The package includes English and German characters, 13 stylistic alternate letters, as well as a vector ornate in .eps and .ai formats.
Quirky and heavily decorative steampunk fonts
If you imagine your steampunk letters to be even more decorative and stand out right away, there are plenty of complex designs, both futuristic and illustrative.
11. Atlantis (purchase only)
12. Steampunk Demo (free for personal use)
This steampunk alphabet has cogs as part of its look and is very on the nose and decorative. It is a demo font, which means there is no official version of it yet to buy for commercial use, but you can use it for your personal projects.
13. Free Steampunk 3D Lettering (free for commercial use)
This incredibly detailed steampunk font is three-dimensional and very illustrative since all the machinery, cogs and pieces are made to seem very realistic. It is available in PNG and can be converted to JPG, which means it has much more limited use (only in Photoshop, Illustrator, and other graphic design software).
14. Shadow of Xizor (free for commercial use)
This futuristic font is based on the Star Wars Shadow of the Empire video game and comic. It is a narrow serif font that is very reminiscent of 90s video games and MS Word WordArt designs.
15. Fisherman’s Knot (purchase only)
This cool font, as the name suggests, imitates the knots of fishermans’ nets. It is based on the vintage Victorian style but has a completely different and unique style. It comes with an editable label template in a vector format, so if you’re in need of a label, this is a smart purchase to make.
16. Tesla Font (free for personal use)
This is yet another font that looks like it’s straight out of an old video game. It also has illustrative machinery parts and bulky lettering, that will make for a good sci-fi look.
17. Starship Typeface (free for commercial use)
This gorgeous vintage font comes in plenty of variations, both with a texture, 3D style, and different ligatures. It’s a TTF and OTF set, with decorative elements that will give you the space to experiment a lot.
18. Discorgasmique (purchase only)
This steampunk-inspired condensed font looks like a mixture of Art Deco and futurism. The long but narrow elegant letters will look great in a logotype, as well as with other web and print designs.
Simpler, but noticeable steampunk fonts
Finally, if you want the general feel of steampunk, without having to create a very noisy and thematic design, there are some slightly simpler typefaces that might suit you well.
19. Steampunk Slab Serif (free for personal use)
This stencil-style slab serif font has a general steampunk aesthetic, but feels less decorative and on the nose than the rest of the examples. It will make a great letterhead font.
20. Steampunk Wavy (purchase only)
This wavy steampunk font has a very flexible and elegant look since the bends and twists in the letters resemble a flowing textile. You get the airship illustration with it, both in OTF and WOFF font files of regular and rough styles.
21. Steamwreck Font (free for personal use)
Steamwreck is a tall and condensed western-style wrought-iron typeface with worked-details to evoke a ‘steampunk’ feel to the text. It includes regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic typefaces.
