4 Cute, Playful and Whimsical Fonts: Weekly Round Up.

Sometimes you need a font for a kid’s birthday invitation, a kindergarten sign or the Vatican’s sex chambers. Here are some of the best fonts currently available for the aforementioned (and more!) circumstances.

#1 Color Block

Color Block is a font that’s very close to my heart since it’s the typeface I used to create the icon for my flagship app, Looxie.

The Looxie logo is just the letter ‘O’ from Color Block.

Color Block is a colored font, and it includes font files with the letters tinted in a certain color, depending on the font file you decide to use. Only very recent versions of Photoshop and Illustrator CC support this functionality but that’s not such a huge loss since, if you convert the letters to outlines in any other software, you can take care of the coloring yourself.

So, what does it look like? It looks like this

Obviously, I also took ten minutes to create my own design using the font

Color Block is a bit of a paradox: it’s cute and playful but it’s also angular and kinda austere, which opens the door to using it in a wide variety of applications.

You can download Color Block HERE.

#2 Studly

Studly is the kind of font you want to hug.

Plump, cute, good-natured and versatile, it’s the antithesis of try-hard ‘wacky’ and ‘zany’ fonts like Papyrus and Comic Sans. I know that getting on the Comic Sans and Papyrus hate train is pretty played out by now, but I’m not just hating. I’m trying to make a point. And hating.

Anyway, listen: Studly is a bold, rounded sans-serif with many styles that you can stack in layers to create your own customized result. Stuff like this are but a minute’s work

And if you’re willing to put five minutes into it, why not use this cutie for things like this?

You can get Studly HERE. This is an affiliate link, so I’ll be making a few cents if you buy the font through it. Just sayin’.

#3 Highflier

Today’s featured font was a hard one to pick: I knew I had to select one from Denise Chandler’s amazing collection but… which one would that be? All of them are cute and playful and smell of sunshine and marshmallows. I was like a kid in a candyshop with a blank check and no family history of diabetes.

I ended up selecting Highflier although, honestly, it could’ve been any one of them. Highflier is more advanced than most of the others because its different styles can be layered to create very intricate and interesting designs simply by using the font.

Highflier comes in 5 different styles (Regular, Block, Shadow, Slice and Scribble, most of which you can see in my example).

As has become expected of me, I sat down and gave myself five minutes to create something half-decent using the font. This is the result

I don’t know if butterflies are actually love but it was better than my alternative (‘Koalas Are Obese’).

You can purchase Highflier HERE. Note that this is an affiliate link, which means that, should you decide to purchase the font through this link, you’ll be putting some cents in my pocket.

#4 Things

The fourth and final font selection for this week’s “Cute & Playful” theme is Things.

Things is not flexible: it’s hard to read so you won’t be using it to set more than a word or two and its letterforms are not particularly fitting to anything outside of a kindergarten or baby clothing store.

But does it make up for this inflexibility with its cuteness? As Walter White would say, you’re goddamned right it does.

But let’s be real here: this is a font you’ll only be using once, so thank god its relatively cheap ($16.99 at the time of writing).

You can download Things HERE.