It's difficult to overestimate the crucial role typography plays in design; setting the tone and enhancing the visual appeal of any project. Which means that for professional designers, choosing the right font can make the difference between mediocre work and work that truly stands out.
In this article, we'll explore 20 essential fonts that every designer should consider adding to their toolkit. From timeless classics to modern alternatives, these carefully curated typefaces offer a killer combination of versatility and sophistication, whether you're working on print materials or digital content.
Can't afford to pay for tyepfaces right now? Then check out our pick of the best free fonts. Also don't miss our roundup of the best multilingual fonts and our expert guide to font pairings.
01. Helvetica Now
- Price: Individual fonts from £35; complete family for £249
- Format: OTF
Essential though it is, Helvetica wasn't designed to cope with the heavy lifting that the digital age expects of it. That's why Monotype spent four years painstakingly redrawing every single character to create Helvetica Now, an updated version that's ready to work in across digital platforms and solve modern branding challenges that simply didn't exist when Helvetica was originally released.
Helvetica Now comes in three optical sizes – Micro, Text and Display – in weights ranging from Thin to Extra Black, and every size, weight and style is designed to provide maximum legibility in all situations. Launched back in April, Helvetica Now is already the third best seller on MyFonts.
02. Gilroy
- Price: Most fonts from £17.99 (Light and Extra Bold available free); complete family for £132.99
- Format: OTF
Currently the best-selling font family on MyFonts, Gilroy is a modern sans serif with a geometric touch, designed by Radomir Tinkov. Designed as a younger brother to Tinkov's Qanelas font family, it comes in 20 styles, with 10 uprights and matching italics, and weights ranging from Thin to Heavy.
Opentype features include extended language support and Cyrillics, fractions and ligatures, and Gilroy's designed for versatility; Tinkov suggests it's good for everything from editorial and web design through to graphic design and signage. If you want to get a feel for it, two styles are available completely free, so download the Light and Extra Bold weights and see how they work for you.
03. Aktiv Grotesk by Dalton Maag
- Price: From £32.50 (static fonts), £130 (variable fonts)
- Format: OFT, TTF
Looking for a Helvetica alternative? That's exactly what Aktiv Grotesk was designed to be. Designed by Bruno Maag and developed across the years 2010–2023 by multiple designers at Dalton Maag, it's a grotesque sans typeface with weight, width, and italic variable font axes, support for 10 global writing systems, and an extensive icon set.
Beautifully clean and minimalist, Aktiv Grotesk was intended to be warmer than Univers and without the quirks of Helvetica. It has slightly squarer edges than the former and a fractionally taller x-height than the latter. Overall, it offers an authoritative but neutral position, supporting any message without overpowering it.
04. Case 2.0 by Fontwerk
- Price: Individual styles from €50
- Format: OTF, WOFF2; variable: TTF, WOFF2
Case 2.0 is neo-grotesque font designed to meet the demands of complex branding projects while maintaining a familiar and reassuring neutrality. With a clear, neutral design, Case also offers a solid foundation for individual adaptations and custom designs.
It was created in 2023 by renowned type designers Erik Spiekermann, Anja Meiners, and Ralph du Carrois as a development of their 2020 font Case. Their intention was to combine the authority of classic fonts with a contemporary look, and they describe it as a "modern alternative to the classics". The font offers three optical sizes for versatility, a unicase feature, improved legibility, and real italics.
05. Financier by Klim Type Foundry
- Price: Individual styles from £60
- Format: OTF
Drawn for the redesign of the Financial Times newspaper in 2014 under the direction of Kevin Wilson and Mark Leeds, Financier is an elegant and authoritative serif, with an aesthetic inspired by Eric Gill’s classic letterforms. As you'd expect, then, its versatility handles news and features well, both in print and online; even on small and narrow mobile screens.
It's comprised of two complementary families: Financier Display and Financier Text. Financier Text draws pragmatic detailing from Solus and Joanna, while Financier Display echoes Perpetua’s stately charm.
06. GT Sectra by Grilli Type
- Price: Individual styles from $75
- Format: OTF
Designed in 2013 by Dominik Huber, Marc Kappeler and Noël Leu, GT Sectra is a serif font was originally designed for use in the long-form journalism magazine Reportagen, which featured interesting stories from all around the world. It was inspired by Blackletter, but the main idea was not to reproduce any historic typeface, but to translate those ideas in a more contemporary design.
The font has since been expanded to three subfamilies: GT Sectra, GT Sectra Fine, and GT Sectra Display. In its creators' words, it combines "the calligraphy of the broad nib pen with the sharpness of the scalpel knife." This sharpness defines its contemporary look, which stands out for its high legibility while retaining a unique visual character.
07. Chalet Comprimé
- Price: Free (web); $175 per font (desktop)
- Format: OTF
Chalet Comprimé was inspired by celebrated French fashion designer René Chalet, and extends the original Chalet font family. This is more stylised than many of the other professional fonts in this list, but its compact, clean letterforms make it idea for anyone looking for an elegant typographical solution. The family includes 10 fonts: three different weights in three styles, plus a titling face (above is the Chalet Milan 1980 variant). The web versions of these professional fonts are free up to 12,500 page views per month.
08. Sabon
- Price: Individual styles from $76.28
- Format: OTF
Sabon is Jan Tschichold's response to a request to design a new version of Claude Garamond classical Roman. It features a smooth texture and a highly distinctive 'f' in the italic variant. This professional font family has long been popular for typographers setting book text. The family is named after Jacques Sabon, who introduced Garamond’s Romans to Frankfurt.
09. FF Din
- Price: Individual styles from $174.15
- Format: OTF
Added to MOMA's digital typefaces for its Architecture and Design collection back in 2011, FF Din is a popular choice among designers. Created by Dutch type designer Albert-Jan Pool between 1995 and 2009, this sans serif is ideally suited to advertising and packaging, logos and branding. It's available in a range of styles and weights, and you can pick up a single font or opt for a bundle that contains the versions you like best.
10. Oswald
- Price: Free
- Format: Google web font
Oswald has become a popular professional font choice for designers, especially for those working in the world of of the web. A reworking of the classic style historically represented by the 'Alternate Gothic' sans-serif typefaces, this professional font has been re-drawn and reformed to better fit the pixel grid of standard digital screens.
11. Brandon Grotesque
- Price: Individual styles from $66.35
- Format: OTF
Designed by Hannes von Dohren in 2009, Brandon Grotesque was influenced by the popular geometric-style, sans serif typefaces of the 1920s and 30s. Equipped for complex, professional photography, Brandon Grotesque won the Type Directors Club Award in 2011.
12. Aviano
- Price: Individual styles from $41.45
- Format: OTF
Named after a small town at the base of the Alps in Northern Italy, Aviano typeface is inspired by the power and timeless beauty of classic letterforms. A gorgeous design, Aviano was created by type designer Jeremy Dooley, owner of one-man foundry Insigne.
13. Proxima Nova
- Price: Individual styles from $25
- Format: OTF/TTF
Used by over 25,000 websites, including Buzzfeed, Wired and Mashable, Mark Simonson's professional font Proxima Nova is an extremely popular choice amongst designers. The extensive family is available in seven weights (thin, light, regular, semi-bold, bold, extra-bold and black), with matching italics, small caps and condensed and extra-condensed widths.
14. Rockwell
- Price: Individual styles from $67.99
- Format: OTF/TTF
Geometric slab serif Rockwell was inspired by a 1910 font titled Litho Antique. Designer Morris Fuller Benton revived Rockwell in the 1920s before it was redesigned and published in 1934 by Monotype, in a project headed by Frank Hinman Pierpont.
15. Le Havre
- Price: Individual styles from $41.45
- Format: OTF
Art deco-inspired typeface Le Havre was named after the port where many a famous luxury cruise liner was launched in the 1930s. Compressed capitals, a low x-height and geometric construction give this beautiful typeface a retro look and feel, with the new contemporary update in 2009 lending itself to all manner of creative projects.
16. Mallory
- Price: Individual styles from $60
- Format: OTF
Mallory is the product of type designer and teacher Tobias Frere-Jones. It's a beautiful professional font, which began as an experiment in mixing typographic traditions, building a new design with British and American traits.
Frere-Jones has a number of best-selling type designs under his belt, but Mallory was the first font he created after splitting with long-time creative partner Jonathan Hoefler.
He comments on his website: "Mallory was built to be a reliable tool, readily pairing with other typefaces to organise complex data and fine-tune visual identities. Each style contains over 1250 glyphs, to anticipate a wide range of content: small caps and old-style figures for running text, lining figures and uppercase punctuation for headlines, tabular figures and over a dozen currency symbols for financial data."
17. FF Meta
- Price: Individual styles from $162.53
- Format: OTF
Created by outspoken type designer Erik Spiekermann, FF Meta was first called PT55, a typeface made for easy reading at small sizes for West German Post Office in 1985. Spiekermann continued work on his design to include more weights and styles, later releasing it as FF Meta, one of the first and truly foundational members of the early FontFont library.
With a clean, cheery and distinctive aesthetic, professional font FF Meta flourished in the early 1990s and has been a firm favourite ever since. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York added FF Meta to its permanent collection, one of only 23 fonts selected to represent typography of the digital era.
18. Soho
- Price: Individual styles from $49.74
- Format: OTF
Beefy slab serif Soho is the product of renowned type designer Seb Lester. The super-family has over 40,000 glyphs and represents three years' worth of work.
"As a type designer I'm preoccupied with finding ways in which I can address modern problems like good legibility in modern media, and create fonts that work precisely and efficiently in the most technically demanding of corporate and publishing environments," he comments on the Monotype website.
19. Davison Spencerian
- Price: Free for web, $75 for desktop
- Format: OTF/web font
Davison Spencerian is a tribute to American letter designer Meyer 'Dave' Davison. He was arguably one of the most distinguished lettering artists of the 20th century. With a library of Spencerian designs, Davison Spencerian typeface made its first appearance in Photo-Lettering’s 1946 catalogue and remains a benchmark of the ornamental script genre.
Tireless hours have been spent by Mitja Miklavčič and House Industries designers Ben Barber and Ken Kiel to preserve the poise and precision of Davison’s masterwork in this faithfully-rendered digital incarnation.
The House Industries website states: 'From automotive exhaust accessories and pirate-themed wedding invites to New Orleans sissy bounce hip-hop CD covers and upmarket bivalve ambrosia packaging, Davison Spencerian offers sober sophistication and unparalleled flexibility'.
20. Maelstrom Sans by Klim Type Foundry
- Price: From $60
- Format: OTF
We'll end with something a little different. Maelstrom & Maelstrom Sans is a reversed-stress typeface that was specifically designed to be "perverse". Created by Kris Sowersby in 2019, its razor-thin spacing, heavy horizontals and spindly diagonals make for a typeface that feels fragile and off-kilter.
Available in a single bold weight, this font is clearly not for the faint-hearted. But if you're looking for your designs to truly stand out as different, it may be worth giving a try. You can see examples of Maelstrom & Maelstrom Sans in action in T.J. Tucker’s Texas Monthly redesign and Jessica Svendsen’s Yale School of Architecture poster.
