Welcome to March’s edition of our roundup of the best new fonts for designers. This month’s compilation includes interesting new uses for variable font technology, some warm, approachable typefaces, and a couple of excellent scripts.
Hour
Hour is a fantastic, experimental variable font that employs two axes to create a 3D effect. Hour and Okta scale the multiple dots that construct each letterform to change the contrast and the angle of light. It’s crying out to be animated.
Raconteurs
Raconteurs is one of the most charming script fonts I’ve seen in some time. It loops and swirls, creating letterforms with a single stroke — if you drop a ribbon onto a page and have it magically form letters, they would look a lot like Raconteurs.
Kommuna
Kommuna is a monospaced serif—sometimes referred to colloquially as a typewriter font. It’s just had new bold and black weights added, and there are five widths available: Ultra Narrow, Narrow, Normal, Wide, and Ultra Wide.
Thermal
Thermal is a contemporary serif available as a variable font with two axes — weight, and optical size. As the name suggests, thermal is a warm, enveloping typeface that is easy to read for extended periods and delivers character at display sizes.
Bluteau Code
Bluteau Code is part of the Bluteau collection of typefaces, which includes 17 different families, from the original Bluteau to Arabic, Hebrew, math, slab, and more. We selected Bluteau Code from the group because finding a coding font with such elegance is rare.
TT Espina
TT Espina is a popular display serif that has been fully updated with revised kerning, hinting, OpenType features, an extended character set including Cyrillic support, and new stylistic sets. It’s an excellent choice for display type that needs to stand out.
Beausite
Beausite is a type system of four different typefaces that use the same underlying structure. Classic, Fit, Slick, and Grand all apply different amounts of contrast to a neo-grotesque skeleton, giving you plenty of options for mixing and matching.
Unigeo
Unigeo is an 80s-inspired geometric sans that looks like it should adorn a VHS cassette or the cover of an early computer programming magazine. It’s available in five different variable fonts, of which the UNIGEO128 version is particularly pleasing.
Bettoni
Bettoni is a beautifully executed Didone with three optically adjusted variations — Text, Subhead, and Display — providing a wealth of detail for fine typography.
Gio
Gio is a bold serif typeface with acute brackets contrasting with sweeping curves in the lowercase. It works best as a display font. A condensed version is available that is useful for large headlines in limited space.
Luma Sans
Luma Sans is a wide geometric sans serif with almost circular bowls. Text set in Luma Sans feels simple and considered. It works great at large and small sizes and is available as a variable font.
Squil
Squil is a humanist sans serif with bent stems that hint at calligraphy. It’s a variable font with two axes, one for weight and the other for the roundness of the corners. It’s friendly, contemporary, and very readable at small sizes.
Brushware
Brushware is a superb brush script that oozes casualness while being exceptionally readable even at smaller sizes. With a little tweaking, Brushware passes as hand-lettering at large sizes.
Lexik
Lexik is an expressive serif typeface. Its curves are broken by sudden angles, giving it a sharpness and a certainty, as if a broad-nib pen has been scratched over a page rather than stroked. If you were writing a political manifesto, you’d want it set in Lexik.
Krimi
Krimi is a narrow geometric sans serif inspired by vintage movie posters. The condensed shapes and thick strokes are visually appealing, and it works best at extremely large sizes and with small amounts of copy.