Free fonts can be sourced from innumerable free font websites these days. Most free fonts, however, are of dubious quality and limited practicality. One of our devoted interests is collecting the most useful free fonts for use in our own projects. And so you, our dear reader, get to benefit from our research that we give away free!
Today we have fourteen of the most popular free sans-serif fonts that meet our criteria for usefulness. Our criteria is very simple, and yet it is very difficult to find free typefaces that meet them. Let’s have a look at the criteria.
A useful free sans-serif typeface must have these qualities or attributes:
- It must be good looking
- It must not have any overly-deviant or idiosyncratic glyphs that limit it’s usefulness
- Have Normal, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic weights
- It must be proven to be already popular: this is an important part of the vetting process. In matters like this, the crowd’s opinion matters tremendously
As far as commercial sans-serif typefaces go, Helvetica, News Gothic, Frutiger, etc. of course fit these criteria and are of obvious and long-established worth. Simple enough—but this level of utility and popularity is not easy to replicate in the world of free fonts! I know you’ve come across your share of typographic stinkers and let-downs and have wasted a lot of time trying to find goodies among the baddies. But now, let’s see what our research yielded so you can get to downloading!
The 14 Most Popular Free Sans-Serif Fonts
These fonts are listed in their order of popularity according to the frequency and position in which they were referenced in our research. However, this is tempered by the criteria of having to have the four most-popular font weights listed above. So there are indeed much more popular free sans-serif fonts than the ones listed here but which happen to not have all four of the important weights available for free, or available at all. There are a lot of free sans-serif typefaces that only have one or two weights. Many of them are no doubt beautiful and even widely used, but this lack of a full basic set of weights makes them less useful in a general-purpose sense, and general-purpose usefulness is our most important factor in doing this particular list.
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Ubuntu
- Rating:
- Download page: http://font.ubuntu.com/
Aller
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Aller
Yo, Font-Addict! Make sure to check out The Big Book of Font Combinations. Go grab a copy from Amazon or B&N, or grab the DISCOUNTED ebook PDF digital download version (40% OFF the hardcover retail price!) from the BonFX Store, and stare at all 350+ examples of informative font combinations for web and print. You know you want to!
Quicksand
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Quicksand
Dejavu
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/DejaVu-Sans
Delicious
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.exljbris.com/delicious.html
Puritan
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Puritan-2.0
Casper
- Rating:
- Download page: http://fontfabric.com/casper-free-font/
Cabin
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Cabin
Lato
- Rating:
- Download page: http://code.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Lato
Luxi Sans
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Luxi-Sans
Fontin Sans
- Rating:
- Download page: http://exljbris.com/fontinsans.html
Sansation
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Sansation
PT Sans
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/PT-Sans
Chivo
- Rating:
- Download page: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/chivo
Yo, Font-Addict! Make sure to check out The Big Book of Font Combinations. Go grab a copy from Amazon or B&N, or grab the DISCOUNTED ebook PDF digital download version (40% OFF the hardcover retail price!) from the BonFX Store, and stare at all 350+ examples of informative font combinations for web and print. You know you want to!
Some of these are cool & unique, but a couple of them are boring, I downloaded 6 of them that looked the most unique.
Hi Mike. Agreed – these are not amazing show stopper typefaces. But neither is Helvetica. In that sense, these are more like a woodworker’s saw and hammer – the basics required to get the job done. In that sense, they are “beautiful” 🙂
I agree with Douglas’s response to Mike. These fonts can be good options for body copy. They have a smudge of flavor to them. They are not headline fonts.
I actually used Aller in a catalog I wrapped up a couple weeks ago. Worked great for all the blocks of text. Very readable without taking up a huge footprint.
The only downside to Aller in my opinion is the numbers don’t all sit on the same baseline. For item numbers and pricing where you have a string of numbers, it looked too jumbled, so I used Melbourne for all the pricing and spec charts. It all worked out OK (except melbourne doesn’t have the degree glyph which I needed), but I’d rather have just used one font for all.
Hi Sean: This was the intent of the list – fonts that are “usable” and not just a one-off weight for a display context. I’ll have to keep that in mind about Aller. That old-school shifting baseline looks cool if there’s not much data being presented, but where the goal is numerical info displayed cleanly, you gotta keep the baselines fixed. Aller really is kind of all over the place above and below, isn’t it?
I think overall, this is a good list. I’ve noted a few of these that I plan to download. I would like to suggest an addition to this list: Open Sans. It was first available on Google Fonts I think. Anyway, I’ve found it to be a very versatile sans serif.
That is a beautiful font that will make it on an update to this list or another like it. It is gaining in popularity but doesn’t yet have the cache the other ones on this list have, which enjoy strong popular recognition. I’m planning on doing a similar post of just Google fonts so you can be sure Open Sans will make it there!