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Serif fonts are the timeless classics that’s gone far beyond the old-style and Didone aesthetics. The variety of such fonts is immense, allowing designers to pick something truly beautiful for any task. So rest assured, you will not find any of the overused formality here, and the choice of minimalist and rich in decor serif fonts will strike you.
So, what are you here for? A highly legible serif font for the body text? Or a baroque type for luxurious branding to make it look even fancier? Or maybe you need a trendy serif with lots of ligatures and stylistic alternates for a print project? I have something for any of the listed purposes and even more! This is the typographic selection I prepared with particular diligence and care, as the serif font aesthetic keeps me fascinated for as long as I do design.
The lovers of the Didone style will find some great options with contrastive thick and thin lines. And those who prefer the good old blackletter-based serifs will love the Roxborough and Addington types. The designers seeking some slab merriness and expressiveness aren’t forgotten either — some simple yet catchy types of the kind go here too!
Types of Fonts and When Use Them Best
In order to motivate you for some fanciful typographic combinations, let’s bring some theory first. Each font type has its visual features, and according to them, you’ll find the best projects to use them for.
- Serif fonts — contain serifs at the end of a character. Classic serif fonts are suitable for big and dense pieces of copy to use for newspapers, cards, books, or website body text. They perfectly work for logos and branding too. Display serif fonts can be used anywhere, from posters to apparel design. You can pair classic serifs with any other types, whereas display serifs are good only with minimalist sans serifs. Some of the most popular serif fonts are Times New Roman, Garamond, Didot, and Georgia.
- Sans serif fonts — don’t have serifs at the end of letters and symbols. Like serif fonts, they can be highly legible and used for texts. Stylized fonts are the exception, though. But you can use them in any other projects, from modern and sharp to reserved and classy. Sans serif fonts are known for their pairing superpower, as they can go with scripts, displays, slabs, and serifs. You definitely know some popular sans serif fonts: Helvetica, Arial and Century Gothic.
- Slab fonts — contain thick, block-like serifs. Slab fonts can have a powerful visual impact on branding, prints, advertising, or sports design concepts. They look heavy and therefore become a huge attention magnet. This means you should not pair them with any types other than sans serif in order not to mess up or overload the composition.
- Script fonts — imitate the handwriting style. There are many types of them: cursive, hand-lettering, signature, and more. Depending on the font, you can use it as a romantic element for invitations and cards or to add a hand-crafted feel to prints and stationery. Script fonts can pair with sans serif and serif typefaces, creating noble and infinitely charming duos.
Our Team’s Top Pick
Fregan Typeface
Fregan is a sharp serif font with an elegant feel. It creates unique characters by combining modern shapes with curvy details. Fregan is a unique typeface inspired by old-style serif and contemporary fonts. It contains an additional Fregan Sans, working in harmony with Fregan Serif to create awesome typographic combinations. Perfect for elegant branding, magazine & logo design, headlines, posters, packaging, and more.
Roxborough CF | Calligraphic Serif
Roxborough is a dramatic serif font, influenced by classic calligraphy and hand lettering — a great pick for all lovers of Times New Roman and Garamond serif typefaces. The font comes with rich, open construction built around a distinctive single-storey “a”. This feature allows Roxborough to pair nicely with the stylized, expressive italics. Both traditional and chic, this serif font transforms text into art; it adapts to many applications, including identity design, packaging, websites and apps.
North Avellion Font Duo
This font duo works perfectly for those who need a typeface for a headline, logotype, apparel, invitation, branding, packaging, advertising, and many other appliances. The simplicity is the key! Besides, these two fonts can boast uppercase & lowercase, numbers, punctuation, alternates, and swashes. You can use only one font or combine the serif font and script if the choice is too tough.
Parlour
Without further ado, Hustle Supply Co. has created and introduced Parlour, a serif font inspired by Movember, menswear brands, tattoo shops, and barbers. This versatile font is perfect for any project that seeks to convey a solid vintage or crafted vibe. Parlour comes with the texture already applied. This serif font comes in OTF format with a full alphabet, numbers, punctuation & other extra glyphs.
Cinzel
A classic serif font with a pinch of Disney charm — that’s what Cinzel is! This free font comes with everything a designer may need in their work: uppercase and lowercase characters, punctuation, numerals and flawless letter design. There are 6 weights available, and you can use them for any Western European languages: basic multilingual support is on! Whether you have personal or commercial projects, you’re now fully armed.
Riffle Font Family
Riffle Font Family is an elegant serif font family whose design refers to the style of transitional serifs. It has been crafted from scratch with a structural logic of its own: a fusion of pure geometry and optical balance. By combining a variety of styles Riffle is the right font for logos, greeting cards, posters, branding, stationery, blog headers, quotes, and various typographic projects.
Vogue
The name of this serif font speaks for itself, and you’ll surely recognize the type for the legendary magazine. This is Vogue, a free serif with high letters, thin geometric stokes, and bold verticals to keep the characters elegant and balanced. As an all-caps font, Vogue can be used for headers, titles, posters, prints, brand designs. It is built as a minimalist type and pairs well with the script and sans serifs.
Rodest — Font Family
Rodest is a very soft serif font that adds a touch of curvature to certain letters to reflect the feminine value of the shapes. The contrast between thick and thin strokes gives Rodest a harmonious and stylish look. It comes in 9 variables plus an alternative version making it perfect for editorial designs, branding, magazines, logos, headers, and more.
DM Serif Display
DM Serif Display is a high-contrast transitional serif font. With its delicate serifs and fine detailing, the design has been shaped for use in super-sized poster settings. It is accompanied by DM Serif Text for use in smaller point ranges. The font supports a Latin extended glyph set, enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages, so a designer can take advantage of it for a vast range of print and web designs.
Flagoria Caintha Serif Font Family
Meet the Flagoria Caintha Serif Font Family coming with 9 different weights. Every provided serif font feels beautiful, classy, elegant, and modern. The font family is ideally suited for various projects, such as signatures, stationery, logos, wedding decor, quotes, magazine or book covers, website headers, branding, packaging design, and more. Each type contains a complete set of characters and supports all Latin-based languages.
Buttershine Serif
An emotional serif font with bold strokes and Didone-inspired geometry — Buttershine is a great free addition to your toolbox! It contains everything you might need for a smooth workflow: uppercase and lowercase characters, numbers, punctuation, and special symbols, including currency. Not so many free serif fonts can boast a full character set, so don’t limit yourself in creativity and feel free to use Buttershine everywhere you need a distinct typographic solution, from prints to web page design.
Gilantre Font
No need to focus your attention exclusively on the classic and traditional serif fonts, as there are plenty of modern iterations. For example, Gilantre, a minimalist serif font with a marker-drawn look, rounded serifs, and neat geometric vertical strokes. It’s an all-caps type with bonus numerals you’ll need to design a perfect header, logo, or a branding concept with a contemporary touch.
Bodoni Moda
Bodoni Moda is a no-compromises family built for the digital age — one of he most popular serif fonts ever! In its renewed, modern iteration, this serif font family includes a full range of weights, styles, an extended character set, OpenType features, and optical sizes, totalling 64 font files. It was made with love for the classic typography, and that very Bodoni type first designed by Giambattista Bodoni in 1787.
RIEN Elegant Serif Font
RIEN is a modern sans serif font created with incredible attention to trends and love for classical forms. It’s just like a perfect combination of Renaissance art and experimental typography, and this uniqueness is one of its major features. This all-caps font comes with punctuation marks, numerals, and multilingual support. Any project this typeface will be brought to is meant to grab and feast the eye: magazines, web design, and branding will get a powerful visual twist with REIN.
Bruney — Classy Ligature Font
As designers, we see a long-lasting interest of the professional community in clean yet modern serif fonts as well as different fonts with a reserved, clean lines. Trends come and go, but these remain timeless classics. Bruney is a perfect example of what multiple creators want in their toolboxes. Thanks to its unique style and a complete set of characters, including ligatures, this modern serif font will be perfect for branding and logo design.
Queensila Font
Queensila is a modern serif font with a retro spirit — a perfect combination, isn’t it? This free font will rejoice with its character set: uppercase and lowercase letters, punctuation, and numerals. With its cinematographic vibe inspired by the golden age of Hollywood, Queensila can be used for postcard and sign design, posters, book covers, wedding decor, or anywhere else where you seek to add some genuine charm.
Myona Serif & Elfani Script Fonts
Get your luxurious, minimal, and modern design look with Elfani script & Myona serif fonts. Both typefaces contain upper & lowercase characters, ligatures, glyphs, and language support. They are crafted especially for those looking for additional design elements and font collections! Another unique thing is 5 Instagram story templates to complement the final result and share it with your subscribers!
Noto Serif Display
Noto is a global font collection for writing in all modern and ancient languages. Noto Serif is a modulated (“serif”) design for texts in larger font sizes in the European Latin script and Cyrillic, Greek. It has italic styles, multiple weights and styles, and 3,256 glyphs. With all the listed features, this free serif font will work like a complete typographic toolbox where you’ll have variants for perfect font pairing.
Coolumbus Serif Font
Veni, vidi, got amazed! The artistic Coolumbus typeface is pure elegance, wrapped in antique classical imagery, following each terse character in the collection. The set features 220 glyphs and 29 ligatures to build up a monumental message, craft headlines and brand stories, and carry out inspirational mottos. With the bonus of 6 Instagram templates for posts/stories and themed illustrations, you can achieve the idea you’ve been challenging for days!
New York
New York is a beautiful, timeless serif font, the epitome of haute couture, one of the most precious examples in this category. This elegant type is a must-have in your collection and perfect for a design project where you’d like to add some luxurious vibes. New York has a full character sent, including the multilingual support for 200+ Latin-based languages. This serif font is free for personal use, so please contact the author if you want it for commercial projects.
Minty March — Condensed Serif Font
Minty March is an adorable handwritten serif font perfect for cards, invitations, logos, branding, packaging, and more. This condensed serif also works well when combined with the script and handwritten fonts. Minty March contains standard characters (lowercase and uppercase), numbers, punctuation, ligatures, and international linguistic support.
Rosmatika Font
Meet contemporary, cutting-edge serif font inspired by the combination of the old-fashioned and semi-modern looks. With Rosmatica, you’ll take the show (and your design work) to the next level! This free serif font contains beautifully made uppercase and lowercase letters, punctuation, and accents for multilingual support. It’s suitable for logos, packaging, menus, wedding invitations, and so much more.
Gorgone Serif Typeface
This serif font breathes with elegant vibes of classic serifs and has a strong character, suitable for any design. Coming in upper and lowercase with punctuations, symbols & numerals, it can be a great addition to your invitations, logo concepts, headlines or cards, and even apparel & packaging. Multilanguage support is an aid for expressing ideas through your creations globally. Looks aristocratic and luxurious but not pompous it strikes the right balance.
Arsenica
Arsenica is a family of legendary serifs designed by Francesco Canovaro for Zetafonts. The design of Arsenica takes its inspiration from Italian poster & sign design at the beginning of the century, a time when typography, lettering, and illustration were closely interwoven. The final result is a superfamily of 41 weights, covering the design space with an expanded charset of over nine hundred glyphs, with full coverage of over two hundred languages using Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
La Luxes Font Duo + Logos
Got you some time-tested stuff here! Indulge yourself in a luxurious typography pairing with La Luxes; a classic font duo consisting of an elegant script & ligature-rich serif font. Also included in this product are 10 bonus logo templates, allowing you the tools to easily edit the designs you see in the images above and create stunning logos in minutes. Logo templates require Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to open.
Kohm — Vintage Font
Kohm is a vintage display serif font with a rough aesthetic. It’s great for logos, posters, packaging, and badges. Kohm includes uppercase multilingual letters, numbers, and punctuation. Its authors opted not to include a clean version as they thought the rough style would work with this font. And it does! This vintage serif is very subtle when viewed from afar but much more prominent when zoomed in and looks very natural.
MADE Mirage
Welcome a brilliant display serif font comprising the fragments of monumental European serifs with modernistic curves and reserved geometry. The all font family includes 5 modern serif fonts of different weights: you can get them on Creative Market. And here, you’ll have the bold MADE Mirage for free, and we’re sure it’ll be hard not to buy the entire collection — so fanciful and versatile it is!
Farmhand Font Family
Farmhand is a textured, hand drawn, condensed font family featuring serif, sans, inline, italic, and extras styles suited for traditional titling. This font family is all-caps with individually drawn small caps for lowercase (they are not just scaled down copies of the uppercase characters). Experiment by mixing and matching the casing for a variety of effects and render casual designs more catchy. Farmhand is great for packaging, branding, headlines, sign designs, etc.
