Give a fresh look to your designs with the best free sans serifs available today
Sans serif fonts are a cornerstone of modern design, offering clean lines and crisp readability that make them perfect for both digital and print media. However, if you use the same ones every time can, your designs can end up looking samey and boring.
So it's worth livening up your toolkit to give you more options. And if you stick to the best free fonts, you can do so without ever troubling your wallet.
With that in mind, we'll explore some of the best free sans serif fonts available today in the article below. From classic minimalist designs to bold, contemporary styles, these typefaces offer a great range of choices for creating clean, modern aesthetics. So if you're looking download fonts for free, get started here!
Designed by Héctor Gatti, Chivo is a neo-grotesque sans serif typeface family with solid, balanced strokes that give it both elegance and practicality. Available in multiple weights, from Thin to Black, Chivo also includes matching italics. For a more specialised look, check out Chivo Mono, a monospace version that offers the same range of weights.
Designed by Johan Aakerlund, Comfortaa is a rounded, geometric, sans serif typeface ideal for use at larger sizes. Its clean, playful appearance works well for various applications, from logo design to website headers and packaging. Comfortaa comes with multiple weights for added versatility.
Part of Google’s global font collection, Noto Sans is a humanist sans serif with neutral tone that makes it highly legible, even in small sizes. With support for over 800 languages, this versatile typeface is a solid choice for global communications. It includes italic styles, and various weights and widths.
Open Sans is a humanist sans serif whose open forms, large x-height and wide apertures make it one of the most legible fonts on screens. Designed by Steve Matteson and used widely by companies like Google, it offers multiple weights, including a new variable version. If you need a versatile, widely supported typeface, Open Sans is an excellent choice.
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Adobe's first open-source typeface family, Source Sans Pro is a great option for both print and digital use. It has a large x-height and humanist-inspired italics, and is available in six weights with matching italics. was designed by Paul D. Hunt. Based on American Type Founders’ gothics, this font has extensive language support, including Latin and Vietnamese.
Aileron is a neo-grotesque sans-serif font inspired by Helvetica but with design improvements for better legibility. Created by Sora Sagano, it incorporates circular dots and periods following the Euler spiral for a softer look. While conceptually closer to Univers, Aileron offers a modern, versatile design available in 16 weights, ranging from ultralight to black, prioritising visual comfort for readers.
A highly visible sans serif designed by Annunziato Mazzaferro, Mattone is a wonderfully wide and curvy font with sharp, straight-cut endings, and is built to fit beautifully with bold graphics. It'll also work as an attention-grabbing display font or a stand-out paragraph font.
The result of a two-year project by France's Centre Technique Régional pour la Déficience Visuelle and typographies.fr, Luciole has been designed to be easy for people with impaired vision to read. It features strong, heavyweight characters and extra-bold punctuation, accents and mathematical symbols, and it comes in four weights: regular, bold, italic and bold italic. All of them are available under a Creative Commons licence.
Created as part of the United States Web Design System, Public Sans is a free and open source web font designed with interfaces, text and headings in mind. Based on Libre Franklin, this is a strong, neutral font with a broad range of weights and as few quirks as possible. If it's a no-nonsense sans that you're after, you can't go far wrong here.
10. Köhne Makina
Köhne Makina also comes in lovely textured version
Another pleasingly quirky font, this time from Krafti Lab. Köhne Makina is a tall vector all-caps font with lovely rounded ends with an urgent but friendly feel to it, and it's free for personal and commercial use. If you want something a bit grungier it's also available from Krafti Lab in a textured version. In case you were wondering, Köhne means 'old, worn or outdated' in Turkish and Persian.
One for fans of terrible cult sci-fi, Aire Exterior is a public domain, geometric sans serif based on the title screen of Ed Wood's infamously bad 1959 classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space. Despite its truly awful heritage, the font itself is quite a looker.
12. Ferghaus Sans
We love the free version of Ferghaus; you might want to pay for all the OpenType features, though
Described as a modern sans with a twist, Ferghaus is a versatile font with plenty of OpenType features such as alternate characters, ligatures and swashes, and is suitable for everything from classic-style designs or more modern creations. This free demo version only contains the standard characters, but it's more than enough to give you a feel for Ferghaus' capabilities.
13. Gorgeous Grafix
Gorgeous Grafix is perfect for drumming up a bit of excitement
Looking for a sans serif that's a little bit futuristic? Darrell Flood's Gorgeous Grafix could be just the thing; we reckon it has a bit of a Star Wars feel to it, with thick, sharp strokes really stand out on the page. It's free for personal use, but Darrell adds that he appreciates donations.
A modern header font designed by Daler Mukhiddinov, Goodlight is a sans serif that's apparently inspired by walking home at night; we'll take Daler's word for that. It's a splendidly clean-looking font that comes in normal and light flavours, and it's free to use in commercial projects under the SIL Open Font Licence.
Red Hat Display is a typeface family designed by Jeremy Mickel of MCKL, commissioned by Paula Scher at Pentagram for the open source software company Red Hat. Designed by Jeremy Mickel, it's a fresh take on a geometric sans and inspired by American sans serifs such as Highway Gothic and Tempo. It comes in two optical sizes and in a range of weights, including italics, and the entire family is available to use under the SIL Open Font Licence.
What is a sans serif font?
A sans serif font is a typeface that doesn't have serifs, which are the small strokes or extensions that appear at the end of longer strokes in serif fonts. (The word "sans" comes from the French word for "without".) In general, this makes sans serifs cleaner and easier to read than serif fonts, especially at smaller sizes. They are also often used by brands, especially tech companies, to convey a modern, minimalist and professional look. Commonly-used sans serifs include Helvetica (a classic typeface often considered the standard for clean, neutral type), Arial (an approachable and friendly alternative to Helvetica with more rounded edges) and Roboto (Google's default font for Android).
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Jim McCauley is a writer, performer and cat-wrangler who started writing professionally way back in 1995 on PC Format magazine, and has been covering technology-related subjects ever since, whether it's hardware, software or videogames. A chance call in 2005 led to Jim taking charge of Computer Arts' website and developing an interest in the world of graphic design, and eventually led to a move over to the freshly-launched Creative Bloq in 2012. Jim now works as a freelance writer for sites including Creative Bloq, T3 and PetsRadar, specialising in design, technology, wellness and cats, while doing the occasional pantomime and street performance in Bath and designing posters for a local drama group on the side.
