What are the best fonts for making signs? Here’s a roundup of twenty of my favorite typefaces for signs, posters, or any graphic design project.
Whether you are decorating your home or if you’re in the business of sign-making, you know that fonts are everything! Choosing the perfect one will ensure that you’ll dazzle everyone who reads the words.
Is your head spinning trying to select the perfect font?
There are so many fonts to choose from that the selection process often overwhelms me. This list contains my favorite tried-and-true font options for creating signs so that I’m not continually going back to the drawing board.
The Best Fonts for Making Signs
I’ve gathered all of my top picks for typefaces that would look perfect on your next sign project. Bonus: they can also be repurposed for your other graphic design projects!
Below, you’ll find a rundown of the best fonts for making signs and some suggestions for using them outside of sign-making.
These are direct links to the fonts used in the graphic above:
Family (Adorn Serif)
Welcome (Avallon)
Faith (Taberna)
Love (Brushability)
Mr and Mrs (Beloved)
Celebrate (La Parisienne)
Happy Place (Golden Youth Caps)
Grace (Flamingo)
Wild at Heart (Northern Soul)
Farmhouse (Kathya Script)
Est. 2009 (Fairwater)
Journey (Isabella Script)
Blessed (Microbrew)
Create (Octavia Script)
Together (Adorn Condensed)
Beach House (Buttermilk Farmhouse)
Grateful (Charcuterie)
Little One (Legend Script)
Home (Midnight Owl)
Gather (Ragazza)
Which font is best for your sign project?
Here’s a closer look at each individual font, the qualities that make them unique and suggestions on where to use them.
Adorn Serif
(Displayed as “Family” in the header graphic)
Adorn is a welcoming family of typefaces! With a modern and sometimes quirky twist on the staid, almost corporate look of formal invitations, this family of lettering typefaces arms designers with many faces that work harmoniously. Adorn offers seven display fonts, four script designs, monograms, ornaments, illustrations, banners, frames, and catchwords.
Adorn Serif and Slab Serif are available in Regular and Bold weights. Though these display fonts can also be used for body text, their uppercase mode shines, adding texture and style to a message.
Avallon
(Displayed as “Welcome” in the header graphic)
Avallon is a handpainted brush font that uses high-resolution brush stroke images with incredible definition instead of the traditional vector format. With this font, you get an amazing paintbrush effect built in as a transparent texture, with no extra work required – perfect for making signs!
Taberna
(Displayed as “Faith” in the header graphic)
Taberna is a type of system that provides a wide range of choices for any design project. The typeface comes in Sans and Serif layered versions, plus a monolinear Script font.
Taberna is the result of having explored design trends in bar signage, liquor packaging, and streetwear. Taberna is a funny display font with a Sans version—that provides a more clean and simple design—and a Serif one, which gives text a more distinctive and somber personality.
The Script version matches perfectly with the heavy Caps of the typeface. Taberna is a versatile font well-suited for headlines, posters, logotypes, signage, and much more!”
Brushability
(Displayed as “Love” in the header graphic)
Brushability is a brush font family with nine fonts, all united by a brushy look. All fonts complement each other perfectly and can be used either together or with many other brush-looking fonts on the market.
The script contains a lot of alternates, swashes, ligatures, arrows, etc., while the Extras font has quite a few design elements with the same brush look – such as arrows, frames, and swashes – to add more personality to your signs!
Beloved
(Displayed as “Mr. and Mrs.” in the header graphic)
Beloved Sans is a simple sans-serif font that likes to get swashy. It’s an all-capitals face with corresponding small capitals scaled to about 85% of the original letters — just enough differentiation to be distinctive in the display settings for which it’s designed.
Beloved Sans includes over 800 swash and alternate forms, making it incredibly versatile for wordmarks and distinctive headlines. The titling variant adds an extra stroke to the verticals for a hint of Art Deco style, while the swashed capitals add calligraphic flair to an otherwise understated sans-serif.
Includes regular and bold weights, lining, and old-style numerals. In addition to using this font for signs, mix and match characters for package designs, menus, and invitations.
La Parisienne
(Displayed as “Celebrate” in the header graphic)
La Parisienne is a collection of fonts inspired by Paris avenues and boulevards full of inimitable French charm. This font family is a mix of hand lettering and classic forms.
All fonts in the collection work well together, and while they share some of the features, each of the fonts has its own character. The main fonts in the collection are full of open-type features such as stylistic and contextual alternates and swashes. A must-have for your signage designs!
Golden Youth
(Displayed as “Happy Place” in the header graphic)
The Golden Youth Font Duo is a stylish and modern harmony of sans-serif & script typefaces.
With a tall condensed sans-serif font and a free-flowing script companion, Golden Youth offers beautiful contrasting typography for various design projects, including signage, logos & branding, packaging design, advertisements & product designs, and social media posts!
Flamingo
(Displayed as “Grace” in the header graphic)
Flamingo is a handwritten modern script calligraphy font with numerous alternates. You can use it for several projects, including logos, wedding invitations, headings, signatures, T-shirts, letterheads, signage, labels, and posters!
Northern Soul
(Displayed as “Wild at Heart” in the header graphic)
Northern Soul is a brush typeface made specifically for creating hand-lettered artwork. With two styles, caps and script, which fit perfectly together and add personality to your design work!
Kathya
(Displayed as “Farmhouse” in the header graphic)
Kathya Script is a contemporary calligraphy typeface, a mixture of retro script and modern sans serif. It will give your design a classic yet elegant touch.
With almost 430 glyphs and 176 alternate characters, multiple language support, and a choice of useful ligatures, swashes, and more, it is a very versatile font!
Fairwater
(Displayed as “Est 2009” in the header graphic)
Fairwater’s aesthetic derives from three sources: the cursive handwriting styles popularized in the early to mid-1900s, the simplified, forgiving letterforms of tattoo lettering – and the pictorial themes that informed early-to-mid 20th-century naval tattoos.
The Fairwater family includes two highly legible sans and script faces – friendly, monoline, and casual – in light, regular and bold weights. Fairwater also includes four shower serif faces for use at display sizes, culminating in the vaguely botanical “Sailor” and elegantly striped “Deco” weights.
Isabella Script
(Displayed as “Journey” in the header graphic)
Isabella is handwritten stylish calligraphy fonts, which combines historic copperplate styles with contemporary typefaces with a dancing baseline, which makes it perfect for your signage design projects!
Microbrew
(Displayed as “Blessed” in the header graphic)
Microbrew is a versatile retro display family with 14 individual styles, plus retro banners, ornaments, and symbols. The more detailed styles work well at large sizes, and the cleaner styles add legibility at smaller sizes.
Microbrew is an all-caps display font, but the lowercase act as alternates. For super-easy alternates, mix uppercase and lowercase letters. To add to the realism, Microbrew includes double-letter ligatures.
Microbrew also includes a set of extremely intentional ornaments and symbols. Designed to give a vintage feel, the ornaments and symbols compliment Microbrew nicely to round off the family. The ornaments also include catchwords, old-style numbers, and many retro symbols.
Octavia Script
(Displayed as “Blessed” in the header graphic)
Octavia Script is another lovely modern calligraphy typeface, which is combining the style of classic calligraphy with a modern style. This is a great font for signage projects with a vintage feel!
Adorn Condensed
(Displayed as “Together” in the header graphic)
Adorn is a welcoming family of typefaces! With a modern and sometimes quirky twist on the staid, almost corporate look of formal invitations, this family of lettering typefaces arms designers with a large number of faces that work harmoniously, despite the distinctiveness of each. Adorn offers seven display fonts, four script designs, monograms, ornaments, illustrations, banners, frames, and catchwords.
Adorn Sans Display Fonts:
• Adorn Sans Condensed bucks the template-derived wedding trend, given its modernity and informality. Brimming with whimsy and the eccentricities of the human touch, Condensed Sans also has contextual alternates with Ambi case letters— a distinctive feature not usually found in display fonts.
• Adorn Sans Expanded is a display font with warmth and hand-wrought charm that works as an elegant replacement for formal type.
Buttermilk Farmhouse
(Displayed as “Beach House” in the header graphic)
Buttermilk Farmhouse is a gorgeous and rustic farmhouse style font that is one of the latest trends and can be seen everywhere you look and can be used on everything from signage to branding to editorials!
Charcuterie
(Displayed as “Grateful” in the header graphic)
Charcuterie is a family of ten distinct yet related typefaces, many of which have their own font families and three decorative/ornamental typefaces.
The family of Charcuterie is a bit reminiscent of early 1900s styling, not precisely Bauhaus or Art Deco, not a revival, but an imagined restoration based on memory, captured from novels and movies set in Paris, a modern echo of a time when people strolled along and stopped to read a French bistro chalkboard menu drawn with letters that resemble Charcuterie.
Legend Script (Little One)
(Displayed as “Little One” in the header graphic)
This font trio was crafted by hand under the inspiration of traditional American typography and lifestyle.
The collection includes Script, Sans, and Serif, which perfectly cooperate to create a vintage mood. It can be used for different purposes: signage, lettering and logotype, labels, t-shirts, product packaging, invitations, advertising, and any key text in your designs!
Midnight Owl
(Displayed as “Home” in the header graphic)
Midnight Owl is a condensed, hand-lettered display font that was based on modernist-serif letterforms and packs a ton of quirky characters into one single font. Use it clean, or dress it up a bit with the bonus decorative layers, including a drop shadow & inlay.
Ragazza
(Displayed as “Gather” in the header graphic)
It honors the greatest handwriting skills – in a different way. Although it doesn’t represent traditional calligraphy styles, it is still part of that expressive world.
With more than 1000 glyphs and taking advantage of the Opentype features, Ragazza is full of personality. When used, it gives a feel similar to ornamental Copperplate mixed with some modern ‘high-contrast’ typeface. Lots of alternates, swashes, and initial capitals are the spine of this typeface, assuring almost infinite combination possibilities!
Hope that this list of the best fonts for making signs inspires you to create some beautiful projects!
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