Whether you’re designing a logo from scratch or refreshing an old one, you have an abundance of display fonts to choose from. While you can use icons or combine text with symbols, a logotype — a text-only logo that focuses on the company’s name or monogram — is a popular choice today.
With this option, though, your font style is a big deal. Not only does it affect readability, but it also influences how people feel about your brand. The right typeface makes your text-based logo trustworthy and memorable.
There are a lot of fantastic logo fonts you can use. But choosing the most suitable from thousands of options is overwhelming, especially if you’re not a design guru. This guide narrows down your choices to the eight best logotype fonts.
The number of logo fonts is almost countless. But most of them fall under four main categories.
Each group is like a font family, with a distinct style that makes it stand out from the rest.
These fonts have small decorative marks or lines, called serifs, at the ends of letters. If you’ve seen the New York Times logo, you’ll recognize these distinctive features that make text easy to read, even in small sizes.
Examples of serif typefaces include Times New Roman, Bodoni, Didot, and Garamond. These fonts are your best bet for a professional logotype that evokes an old-timey vibe.
Unlike serif fonts, sans-serif typefaces don’t have decorative marks at the end of letters. They have a clean, modern appearance. The lack of serifs makes them work well where there’s little room for text, like in a logotype.
Google is one brand that uses sans-serif in its logo. Typefaces in this font category include Avenir, Futura, Helvetica, Raleway, and Proxima Nova.
Script fonts look like handwriting. Examples include Lobster, Brush Script, and Lucida Calligraphy. If you aim for designs that add elegance, creativity, and personality to a logo, these typefaces suit you best.
Designed to be eye-catching, most display fonts have thick strokes and are typically used in large sizes. Their attention-grabbing appearance makes them suitable for headlines, billboards, and, most importantly, logotypes. Examples of display fonts include Bangers, Impact, Bardeen, and Ruslan.
Need suggestions that can inspire your design process? Here are the top fonts for a logo.
Avenir is a geometric font. That means letterforms are mainly made from basic geometric shapes like circles, squares, and triangles.
With even strokes in each character, Avenir has a clean, minimalistic look. It was created in the late 20th century. Today, this sans-serif font is available in six weights — black, medium, heavy, book, roman, and light. Each weight has a slanted or oblique version.
Bodoni is all about high contrast. Its dramatic, thick-to-thin strokes make your font appear sophisticated yet appealing to the eye, while its thin serifs add a touch of style.
If you run a stylish or high-end business (in industries like fashion and editorial), this logotype font might be perfect for you. Bodoni works best at large sizes because its thin strokes can disappear in small text.
Didot is Bodoni’s classy cousin. It, too, combines thick and thin strokes. However, Didot’s thin strokes are more pronounced than Bodoni’s, making the contrast between thick and thin strokes even sharper.
Like Avenir, Futura is a geometric typeface. Strokes have nearly the same weight with almost no contrast. Unlike serif typefaces with extra strokes for decoration, this font keeps things simple.
Futura is available in many forms, including bold, extra bold, light, and medium. Each weight has an oblique version, giving designers more options to experiment with.
Garamond is a classic, timeless serif typeface for logos. The contrast between the font’s thicker and thinner lines is proportioned, making it pleasing to the eye without appearing too extreme or unbalanced.
Some letters like “g” and “a” have a complex, lovely shape that improves the font’s aesthetics.
Helvetica has a high x-height, which is the distance between the bottom and top of a lowercase letter, particularly the “x.” For this reason, the sans-serif font is easily readable, even in small sizes.
Like Helvetica, Proxima Nova is a sans-serif with a large x-height. However, the font’s apertures (open spaces in letters like “c” and “e”) are slightly wider. This makes it easy to distinguish characters and read the font.
The typeface is available in multiple forms, including regular, bold, semi-bold, and extra bold, each with an italic version.
Raleway sans-serif has distinctive letterforms that can add personality to a logotype. For example, the lowercase “L” has a subtle tail, while “W” is uniquely crisscrossed.
Choose the best font for a logo from this top eight list, but use no more than two in your design. Too many fonts will make your logotype look messy and cluttered. An example of a perfect logo font pairing is a serif typeface for your business name (or monogram) and a sans-serif for the slogan.
The right font is one of the elements of a good logo. Here’s how to choose the correct typeface for your brand:
The best font for a logo is easy to read and matches your brand’s visual identity. As a super busy startup founder or small business owner, you might not have the time to scroll through a font library in search of the perfect typeface for your logo design.
With PixelPocket’s brand design services, we take care of everything to save you time. We can design your logo and help you conduct a comprehensive brand audit.
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