Fonts by style
25 ways into the archive that are not category and not alphabet. The first group is about what a typeface evokes and the second is about how it is drawn — a horror face and a slab serif are answers to completely different questions. Every count below is measured from the 337 families in the archive.
By what it evokes
The tradition a typeface comes out of, or the thing it is for. Start here if you know what the type has to say before you know how it should be drawn.
- Horror (4)Drawn to unsettle: dripping, cracked, clawed or decayed letterforms made for posters and titles rather than reading.
- Comic (5)The heavy, bouncy lettering of comic books and cartoons, usually all-caps or near enough.
- Western (4)Nineteenth century American wood type: slabs, spurs and the lettering of a saloon sign.
- Sci-fi (10)Squared, wide or modular forms that read as technological — the lettering convention for the future since the 1960s.
- Pixel (6)Drawn on a visible grid of squares, from the era when a screen could not do curves.
- Typewriter (5)The look of a struck typewriter key: slab serifs, even colour, and often a deliberately imperfect impression.
- Graffiti (4)Spray can and marker lettering from the street writing tradition.
- Retro (17)Deliberately of an earlier period — the shapes are a reference to a decade rather than a solution to a problem.
- Stencil (5)Letters broken by gaps, as if cut from a plate and sprayed through.
- Blackletter (4)The dense, angular scripts of northern European manuscripts and early printing.
- Calligraphy (8)Formal written letterforms, with the weight distribution of a broad-nib pen.
- Marker (23)Casual handwriting made with a felt tip or a brush pen rather than a nib.
By how it is drawn
The vocabulary of the trade: skeleton, stress, contrast and the shape of a serif. Start here if you are matching a face to one you already have.
- Geometric (51)Built from circles and straight lines, with stroke weight that barely changes as a curve turns.
- Humanist (43)Proportions taken from written letterforms, so the skeleton underneath is a pen stroke rather than a compass.
- Grotesque (52)The nineteenth and twentieth century sans tradition: closed apertures, an even rhythm, and as few opinions as the designer could manage.
- Old-style (23)A Renaissance serif — diagonal stress, modest contrast, and serifs that meet the stem on a curve.
- Transitional (26)The eighteenth century serif that sits between old-style and didone: upright stress and sharper contrast, but still bracketed.
- Didone (10)Extreme contrast between thick and thin, with flat hairline serifs joined to the stem at a right angle.
- Slab serif (23)Serifs close to the weight of the stems, cut square rather than tapered.
- Rounded (14)Stroke ends finished as curves rather than cut flat.
- Condensed (21)Drawn narrow, so more words fit across a line without shrinking the type.
- High contrast (20)A pronounced difference between the thick and thin parts of a stroke, which reads as elegant at size and as fragile at small sizes.
- Monolinear (12)Stroke weight that stays effectively constant everywhere in the letter.
- Metric compatible (5)Character widths match a named commercial face exactly, so a document swapped to it keeps its line breaks and page count.
- Ligatures (4)Carries a substantial set of ligatures beyond the usual fi and fl — most often the programming ligatures that join characters like != into one shape.