25 of the Best Modern Fonts in 2020
Get our posts emailed to you with our monthly newsletter, subscribe here.
Modern typography is an art in itself. Where fonts used to take a backseat to impressive graphics, typefaces in 2020 have found their own voice.
The best modern fonts in 2020 combine retro nostalgia with the clean lines of crisp, futuristic minimalism.
Featuring playful, graffiti-style handwritten typefaces, immaculately-elegant serif fonts, and picturesque, travel-inspired scripts — prepare to throw out bad logos and shake up your social media graphics and site design with this zinger of a font list!
Looking for typography inspiration? Here are 25 of the best modern fonts trending in 2020.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Gilbert
Designed in honor of the late LGBTQ hero Gilbert Baker, this font blends the intersections in each letter.
This font design effect gives way to a slippery, playful feel that mimics magnetic fridge lettering and nostalgic childhood books.
A beautifully-simple, modern sans serif, this curvy display font works well for intriguing logo designs and eye-catching block text.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Zefani
With stencil artwork as its muse, this bold yet elegant font fuses together seemingly-opposing design elements from Banksy’s street graffiti and high-fashion marketing.
The angular serifs and missing lines create the illusion of smudged or missing stencil-work, while the intricate circular terminals and geometric shapes give a stylish, modern font twist.
Available in one weight only, this is the perfect font for a boutique brand logo or display typeface. Users can choose from uppercase and lowercase letters, with a pack of basic accents to boot.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: MAK
Taking its inspiration from classical Ukrainian folk music, this font is available both in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
Describing itself as an ‘experimental contrast typeface’, this unusual sans serif font is characterized by its vintage Soviet overtones of thick downstrokes and pinstripe-thin curvature.
Enjoy both capital letters and lowercase letters, along with an orchestra of accents and symbols.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Allyca
The stunningly kitsch font family introduces a range of cheerful scripts. If you’re looking for a handwritten font that can be used for both headers and paragraph text, this font family does it all.
There are six adorable script fonts in this font family, including a fine, regular, and hollow typeface.
An extremely versatile font, this is a great text tool to have in your lettering library for creative projects and social media graphic design.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Argesta
While 2020 modern fonts often have futuristic flair, this font pulls us back in time to provide a traditionally elegant font for any occasion.
Drawing from traditional newspaper typefaces, this fluid lettering has crisp edges and suave, gradiented serifs.
For tasteful headers, subheadings, and body text, Argesta is a sophisticated and professional modern typeface that suits bloggers, newsletters, web content, brochures, lookbooks, pitch decks, and more.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Pathout Script
Graptail designed this handmade font, which pays homage to the graffiti world.
This smooth script imitates the effect of a marker pen gliding across a sleek surface, giving streamlined, clean lettering.
This modern typeface is best used in sentence case for its joined lowercase letters.
This font comes with uppercase, lowercase, and numbers, as well as a catalog of punctuation and common characters.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Bimbo
Girly by nature, thanks to its slightly offensive name, this cute script is a delicate handwritten font family that comes in varying degrees of thickness.
Francesco Canovaro designed this monoline script font family in 2018, which offers users a font library of lettering with more than 300 new characters. Thanks to all these extra characters, this font can be used for over 70 languages.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Okta Neue
This soft yet striking sans serif heavy-weight font is surprisingly calming in spite of the boldness of its geometric shapes.
Contrasting strong, parallel lines with crisp circular closed counters, this geometric font is graceful and memorable — yet thanks to its chic minimalism, extremely versatile.
This OpenType-friendly font family comes in 22 styles — 11 upright fonts and 11 italic fonts. In terms of foreign languages, this font family supports extended Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Bold Ink
This intricate artistic handmade script is a beautifully realistic replica of inked lettering.
Pay particular attention to the uneven texture that gives the impression of ink gliding across paper. The monotone shading even gives the illusion of wet ink glistening under light.
Each letter joins together fluidly for whimsical digital handwriting, making it a great font for marketing materials in the creative and travel industries.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Obrazec
This stark, bold lettering has an overwhelmingly tangible militaristic vibe.
The tall, narrow, block letters are closely spaced together, with curved-off square characters. This integrates both varsity-style lettering and rustic, Soviet military typeface design.
While this font has vintage army notes, the grainy texture of this handmade modern typeface also coincides with the current apocalyptic trend, making it useful as a futuristic font.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Stanley
This elaborate font combines the smooth, silky sheen of a metallic finish with the cut lettering of stenciled fonts.
Stunningly sophisticated, yet tastefully subtle, this high-class modern font features unique stylistic detailing, such as the separated circular terminals and juxtaposing bold geometry. This font design feature can be especially seen in the ‘y’ and the ‘a’.
Enjoy both upper and lowercase letters with this font, as well as a range of basic characters and symbols for the Latin alphabet.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Agnes
Created by Dominik Szabó, this eye-catchingly unique font appears, at first, to have Arabic influences. However, this extremely unusual font is actually inspired by the designer’s own handwriting.
Throwing together sweeping curves, sharp points, and unexpected geometry, this alphabet pulls design elements from Arabian Nights on the one hand, and 1970’s interior design on the other.
With multiple programmed ligatures, this font can be used for Hungarian as well as English, thanks to its special characters.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: xilmperfect
Illustration is trending in 2020 web design and marketing. From illustrated graphic design to illustrated fonts, hand-drawn artwork is starting to take center stage.
This handmade font offers illustrated 3D lettering in both uppercase and lowercase. Building on traditional serif fonts, this bookish typeface is best for large lettering, signage, logos, and headlines.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Untitled Sans
Forever looking for the holy grail of sans serif fonts? Here it is.
Inspired by The Imprint Magazine’s official typeface, the designer of this modern typeface set on a journey to provide the pinnacle of simplicity and no-fuss fonts.
Untitled Sans epitomizes a blank canvas, while offering a bold, well-spaced font family, suitable for everything from body text to large lettering.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Recoleta
A modern spin on a very nostalgic feel, this heart-warming 70’s throwback font harps back to old-school magazine subscriptions and travel adverts.
The curvaceous tilting lettering offers a playful undertone, while both capital letters and lowercase letters display twee detailing in the curved lines and serifs.
Available in 14 different modern style choices, you can enjoy a range of thicknesses, along with a few italic font styles too.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Electric Soul
Taking inspiration from forest tracking symbols and Native American artwork, this intricate all-uppercase font is a real showstopper.
The perfect font for travel photos, social media influencers, hippie bloggers, and edgy t-shirt brands alike, this remarkable font stands out from the rest.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Aeonik
Another deliciously minimalist modern sans serif font family, the Aeonik font group gives users a range of italicized and weighted fonts.
Described by its designers as a ‘neo-grotesque with a geometric skeleton’, this font is crafted as a rigid, stark typeface with tight perpendicular terminals for striking effect.
For stylistic license, users can enjoy three different ‘a’, ‘t’, and ‘j’ choices. This is a top font family for everything from large printed lettering to captions and body text.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Skyscrapers
Another marker pen style font, this modern typeface favors capital letters.
Conveying the impression of rushed handwriting, this uppercase brush font uses the design elements of line art, where each letter is formed without the pen lifting from the page. In this typeface, the effect is exemplified in the zigzags across the ‘E’ and a backward diagonal stroke across the ‘A’.
This font is only available in uppercase letters and is geared toward being a display typeface for signage. If you’re making a shop store front, printing merchandise, creating a brand identity, or designing a logo, this is a killer urban modern font.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Arcana
Another outstanding illustrated font, this hand-designed beauty is a truly creative masterpiece that will jazz up any lifeless text.
Not only is each letter a cleverly-coordinated scribbled version of bookish typeface, the tilted design and rough edges give a playful charm which evokes a feeling of friendliness.
A super approachable font for all occasions, this versatile type works well for both big and small text.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: porpuii
If you’re looking for a modern font that offers a light-hearted ambience in synchronicity with simplistic, easy-to-read lettering, this typeface is an awesome choice.
With a subtle graffiti style, this handwritten font seems as though it could have been crafted with a fineliner marker pen or spray paint can.
A smart choice for children’s products and services, as well as modern metropolitan branding.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Trend
An enchanting yet bold typeface, this slab font has subtle hints of art nouveau design in the swish sweeps on certain letters.
Available in bold, thin, double-line, and hollow styles, this clean-lined wide-spaced uppercase typeface is a top choice for a title font, logo design, typography, and social media graphic design.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Hello Diary
Establishing its brand identity as the love calligraphy, this ‘Hello Diary’ font is an ornate script for decorative purposes.
With crisp joined lettering, artistic calligraphy elements, and stunning loopy handwriting, this romantic font is perfect for adding to photos, creating logos, branding products, or brightening up titles.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Modernhead
This is another example of one of the best modern fonts with a retro twist.
This serif family of fonts also gives a nod to the 70s with its wavy letters and miniature indented serifs.
Differing proportions in the letters give the impression of hand-drawn block lettering. Look closely and you’ll see this exemplified in the high closed counters on the ‘a’ and ‘r’ compared to the central horizontal strokes on the ‘h’.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Bondi
Combining retro and futuristic in one adorable font, this beach bum throwback font certainly gives Bondi Beach vibes.
But, the bubbly lettering, rounded modern style, and contrasting thick and thin lines also harp back to The Jetsons cartoon. In this vein, this font has a futuristic feel at the same time.
A great logo font, this is also an excellent header typeface that works well for media typography, graphic design, and all kinds of large lettering.
Best Modern Fonts of 2020: Arkhip
Robust, formidable, and rugged, this gracefully strong uppercase font combines sharp, sleek rectangles with smooth, wavy lines and detailed closed counters.
Described by the designer as having a ‘Russian soul’, the letters take their cue from the roundedness of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Conclusion
This year’s modern font trends take all the best elements from the past and combine them into crisp new designs.
Particularly prevalent are 1970’s influences combined with apocalyptic yet playful futurism. Handwritten scripts and hand-illustrated typefaces are also a great font choice to jazz up dull headers and large lettering.
Prepare to see more graffiti fonts, textured lettering, and urban scrawls as handwritten typefaces take on a modern meaning.
At the same time, prepare for sleeker simplistic slab typography and modern sans serif text as clarity becomes imperative in the technological era.