Find a font that's just your type in 2021 with this selection including hand-drawn, serif, and more.
Designers, you know how important fonts are to your work, but sometimes picking the best font is tough; there’s so much choice. Here are 10 of the top new fonts for 2021 to help inspire your next project and introduce you to some of the best new modern fonts to suit the latest graphic design trends!
Knowing what the most popular design fonts are can be tricky. According to font psychology, text, and the way it’s arranged, can have a huge impact on a design as a whole, setting both mood and tone, and the most popular fonts tend to do that really well – it’s why they’re popular! For example, wedding designs like stationery and albums often feature a script font because we tend to associate that style with romance.
As people respond to things in particular ways, it’s part of the job of a designer to interpret the message and meaning of a proposed design and choose and place fonts accordingly. The longer that fonts and font families are around and we become accustomed to them, the more we can start to associate them with particular designs, and even come to trust them on sight.
The terms ‘font’ and ‘typeface’ are often used interchangeably outside of the world of professional typography and design, though they aren’t really the same thing. A font is part of a typeface, which is usually a collection of fonts in different weights, sizes, or styles: a font family!
A font family you’re most likely very familiar with is Times New Roman, which includes italic, bold and bold italic versions as part of the ‘family’.
Choosing a font is a delicate balance between interpretation, style, and readability. The most important of these is of course the latter, a font above all needs to be fit for purpose and easily read by your audience.
The style of font will depend on the project it’s being used for. Long-form copy like that in a magazine article, will need to be different to the font featured in an attention-grabbing poster design, and so on. Font families that come with serif and sans serif options are usually good choices for projects where written text may vary in length: serif is usually easier and faster to read for longer copy at smaller sizes than sans serif.
How to choose a font – for a logo for example – will be heavily determined by the brand’s personality whereas selecting a font for a website will focus on aspects like size, weight and contrast, to make sure it’s easy to read.
Try these top 10 fonts from Envato Elements to inspire your next project.
A powerful, all caps sans-serif font family which would be perfect for attention-grabbing titles and headlines. It comes in two weights, and with numerals and punctuation.
Caligna has a unique and modern style that exudes luxury. Stylish and clear to read, Caligna would suit branding for fashion, restaurants, hotels, and much more. The font comes with uppercase and lowercase options, as well as numbers and punctuation.
A beautiful sans-serif typeface that would work well for a designer looking to create something sleek and elegant with a touch of vintage flair. There’s multilingual support for a variety of languages, including French, German, and Spanish.
Try a combination of classic style and minimal design with Royal Diamond. Use this font for bold logo design, posters, and branding. Royal Diamond is a serif font, with a trendy, colored outline.
A stylish serif font with carefully designed contrast in each stroke. There are 2 styles included: all-caps or small capitals, useful for a title and subtitle, and for logos. The style is round, with an assertive design.
Laura would work well as a title or decorative font as its design is modern minimalism, omitting parts of the letters to create an edgy and eye-catching style.
Fonseca is a modern sans serif font inspired by art deco and styles of the early 20th century. It’s all-caps, with straight geometric forms, and a modern twist to make it perfect for contemporary design.
Zuume is a high-impact font family including a variety of weights. It’s a thick, condensed design perfect for display designs that need an impression of aggression and speed.
Carla Sans, with 4 weights included, is an all caps, minimal font with stylistic alternates and ligatures. The download also offers numerals, punctuation and accented characters, with multiple languages supported.
Requila contains upper and lowercase characters, numbers, punctuation, ligatures and international glyphs. Its style is a bold serif, with occasional letter flourishes.
Take a look back at and download some of the most popular fonts for 2020.
Morva is a unique typeface with bracketed serif shapes and decorative swirls. It includes upper and lowercase characters, numbers, punctuation, and accents. Morva would suit wedding-themed designs or designers looking for a font with a simple, elegant appearance.
This hand-drawn font is bold and creative with a look reminiscent of a Western film. In the style of ‘bones,’ Rocking Rochoes includes a regular and vintage option plus a bonus vector pack.
Making use of the Didone genre of serif typeface, SF Kingston has six weights, from ‘extra light’ through to ‘black.’ It’s robust yet still elegant.
Foundry is a stylish hand-written script that would suit logos, prints and other designs that require a little flair of sophistication while still being clean enough to read easily.
A modern font with an elegant baseline, Morning Wishes maintains an air of ‘classic’ style. A calligraphy typeface with long swashes, try it with projects that need a dash of decoration.
The Historia is a hand-painted font with upper and lowercase letters, characters, and punctuation. Great for modern branding and more artistic designs, it’s eye-catching and unique.
Falco has a clean and vintage style which includes options of black, black inline, black inline negative, and black outline. As it’s bold and striking, it would suit posters and other designs that might need to be read easily from a distance.
Sledge hits you, well, like a sledgehammer! It’s a big, bold attention-grabbing font for projects that make no apologies for shouting a message out loud. The tight spacing adds extra drama.
Enyo Slab is a hand-written, slab style serif font. Informal and fun, it would work well with displays that feature a limited amount of text.
Dreamscape is influenced by science fiction and would suit projects with a modern or ‘futuristic’ style such as album covers, posters or t-shirt designs.
Choosing a font is a fun part of the creative design process, and we hope we’ve given you lots of choice and inspiration with our top 10! Just in case we’ve whetted your appetite for even more, you can find thousands of great fonts, all included in a monthly or annual subscription to Envato Elements. And you can discover more popular fonts on Envato Tuts+, as well as keeping up with current font trends and downloading trending script fonts.