Unusual fonts. Have you had enough of dull serif and sans serif typefaces that look like clones of each other?
Are you fed up with display fonts that only look different, but in fact bring nothing new?
So it’s time for some typography madness.
It’s a common practice to create fonts consisting of no letters or numbers – just icons and other non-alphanumeric elements. We call them “dingbats”, and they have been around since the late 80's.
But not all unusual fonts are about dingbats and symbols. Many of the products listed below are so called layered fonts – the phenomenon I haven’t mention in my previous article about typography trends. Layered fonts allow you to overlap different styles of the same letterform in order to create a completely new stylistic effect.
And here we are! Meet 20 of the most creative free and premium fonts that you can use to liven up your designs.
Counterscraps Font (Free Font)
Counterscraps is a dingbat font featuring 73 beautifully drawn icons depicting various food and kitchenware. Each icon is surrounded by natural looking splatters and is easy to incorporate into your designs seamlessly.
We used Counterscraps font to create the font list for this post about free chalkboard fonts.
Don’t hesitate to examine and download them as well.
Laurus Nobilis (Free Font)
This font is the collection of high-quality laurels and wreaths. It can be used to add luxury to a simple text-only logo or a monogram. The character map also features shields, branches, stars, wheat ears and other decorative elements – 62 characters in total. Laurus Nobilis is free for personal and commercial design projects.
BLOKK (Free Font)
BLOKK is the universal font for creating mockups and wireframes. It contains only one symbol and space, but this binary combination is enough to create website mockups of any level of complexity. What’s good about BLOKK is that it is also a web font, which means you can embed it into your web pages easily.
Nexa Rust Extras (Free Font)
I have mentioned Nexa Rust in some of my previous font roundups, but it is just too awesome to pass by. The free version of Nexa Rust Extras includes glyphs rough and clean icons, catch words and arrows. If you have some spare money pay attention to the entire Nexa Rust font family, which includes more than 100 special glyphs in 5 symbol fonts.
WC Rhesus B Bta (Free Font)
WC Rhesus B Bta is simply a collection of paint spots and splatters that can be easily applied to your designs. This symbol font includes splatters of various size and intensity.
KUST – Brush Font (Free Font)
This super grungy, raw brush font has been around for a while, yet it is not overused, so feel free to use in your design works without making them look generic. Despite being uneven and rough it has these elusive consistency and charm that add a natural look to the font. Kust has been created by professional designers from Wild Ones Design (Latvia).
Celebration (Free Font)
The Celebration is a set of 4 fonts, which can be combined in order to create complexly-layered typography. This font family includes filled, outline, inline and shadow, choose any of them, mix up, recolor – and voila! Your design looks cheerful and shiny.
Big John / Slim Joe (Free Font)
Big John is an extremely bold font. Slim Joe is ultra-thin and lightweight. Together, they form an amazingly stylish font duo, which is suitable for magazines, posters and modern ads.
Tokyo | A Designer Font Duo
This font will help you achieve that cool offset effect appearing as a result of print registration errors. Tokyo is a modern sans serif typeface great for headlines and logos.
Ozzombie Typeface + Bonus
Ozzombie is a spooky font for Halloween posters and party invitation cards. It includes two styles – outline and fill, which are intended to be used together. Additionally, the package contains a set of colorful Halloween-styled illustrations to make your holiday designs even more unique and expressive.
MFC Keating Monogram
MFC Keating Monogram is a collection of 5 fonts designed to help you create intertwined one-, two-, or three-letter monograms using the open-type features.
New York font
MONKY Font
Release the Monky!
This playful display font with a hand-drawn appearance offers 7 unique styles and a handful of extras – speech bubbles, catch words and ornaments. As any other multi-style font family, this one allows (and encourages) you to mix and match characters from different fonts for more fun.
Mermaid Tails - A Handwritten Typeface
It is named after the actual fish mermaid tails added to the alternative version of this font. You can combine two versions to get the desirable frequency of tails in your type, or just use the basic version as a regular script font. Besides, the product includes a series of sea-themed hand-drawn illustrations.
Joy in Night - Halloween Typeface
Oh, come on! Halloween again?!
I know, summer is not the best time to promote fonts created for the end of autumn, but this one is worthy of your attention. As a bonus, you will receive a set of handmade vector elements, fun phrases, seamless patterns and ready-made card designs.
Bekabuga Display Font
Bekabuga is a creative geometric display font perfect for summer-themed designs. This creative sans serif comes with Cyrillic letters, numbers and a full set of punctuation and special characters. It also supports international languages.
Totally Tubular Font
Totally Tubular is another playful font with a hand-drawn look, which comes with an outline version. It is weird and quirky, with a retro feel, that’s why we recommend using this font in a combination with colorful backgrounds and abstract geometric shapes.
Adorn Duo
Adorn Duo is an elegant monogram font with sophisticated letters. It comes with two styles – Left and Right, using which you can create seamless two-letter monograms.
Charcuterie Ornaments
Charcuterie Ornaments is a hand drawn dingbat font, which acts like a full-featured logo creation kit. It includes numerous variations of logo shapes, swirls, laurels, dividers, and ribbons. Combine them the way you want, recolor, add text – and your logo is ready.
Spellbound Families
Spellbound is a huge font family containing 20 individual fonts and a bunch of useful extras: 20 vector shapes, 20 doodling shapes, and 15 seamless patterns. The fonts are layered, so you can simply duplicate your type, change its style to outline, inline, or whichever you see fit, recolor it and get a creative 3-dimentional type.
Infister
Infister is a modern, minimalist font based on the smart use of empty space. It can be used for magazines and posters, and also for the new album cover of your garage future-pop music band. Although Infister is too extraordinary to be used on a regular basis, its enigmatic look will favorably emphasize your design works.
Conclusion
I hope that this roundup has boosted your creativity and inspired you to play with your typography. The world needs more crazy designs, am I right? If you think I’m not, don’t hesitate to express your opinion in the comments section below.