Five gorgeous display fonts released recently (2020)
#1 Athena VKF
If it’s not obvious by the existence of this blog, I spend an inordinate amount of time sniffing around the interwebz, looking for amazing free and commercial typefaces to write about.
Sometimes, the smell of a font will lift me from the ground and make me float around like a midcentury cartoon dog flying towards a freshly-baked cake and other times it’ll make me run away from it like a plate of freshly cooked okras.
However, there are fonts that fall between these two extremes. This are their stories.
#1 Athena VKF
You may not know this about me, but I’m Greek-Cypriot. This means that I’m ethnically Greek, living on the independent island nation of Cyprus. I speak a dialect that mainland Greeks struggle to understand, and I look slightly more Levantine than the average Greek.
However, one thing that almost all Greek-Cypriots have in common with our mainland brethren is that we’re pretty much culturally the same. The average person across Greece and Cyprus will listen to the same music, watch the same films and series and have common pop culture points of reference.
All this intro just to say that I, like all people I know, grew up on a steady diet of old Greek movies. And that’s what Athena VKF is about. Created by Vasilis Kanaris, Athena is a part of a project intended to create a bunch of typefaces, each inspired by a Greek city or town (hopefully, he’ll reach down to Cyprus and create a Larnaca typeface too—or else I’ll do it for him).
And the font is yummy-yummy lovely, son.
Athena contains both latin and Greek characters, so it’s not like you can only use it if you’re Greek or a fraternity bro.
Here’s a test design I did with the font while talking to a friend on the phone
As you can see, the design is pretty retrorific. As far as Greek display fonts go, this is one of the best I’ve ever seen and it’s free to boot!
You can download Athena VKF for free HERE.
#2 Planck
Mikko Nuuttila, if that’s his real name (it is), has been offering some of the best free fonts around, with Jaapokki being a firm favorite of mine.
Recently, though, I realized that by falling for the glamorous diva, I ended up neglecting the cyberpunkish gamer girl next door, i.e. Planck.
Planck is an angular monospaced font that’s perfect for display use and not much else. You’d think that, by virtue of it being a monospaced font, you’d be able to use it to code but that’s not really the case, as in small sizes the legibility and readability suffer.
Here are a couple of quick & dirty designs I threw together, using only Planck and some primitive shapes:
You can download Planck HERE. Planck is free for personal and commercial use.
#3 Hocus
Hocus is a condensed sans-serif display font that comes in a single weight, with no bells and whistles.
Still, like many display fonts, it accomplishes what it set out to do with flying colors; that is to say, if you want dramatic, you’ll get it out of this font easily.
OK, I’ll go on a tangent and then return to the font itself: a buncha assholes on Behance are complaining that they can’t download the font. Here are some select quotes
Nice font but it looks like you don't want ANYONE else to use it.
and
Nice font, but there is still no download link anywhere :(
Hey, dickwads, if you wanted it so much, why couldn’t you be bothered to do a search on Google, you little entitled babies?
Moving on.
Here are three designs I did really quick using Hocus and an Unsplash photo. You’ll notice that Hocus works great when combined with photos of a certain mood
You can get Hocus HERE.
PS. Looks like I was wrong. There’s more than one weight of Hocus showcased on Behance, while the version I could find online only has one weight available, hence my ‘only one weight’ claim in the first paragraph. Moreover, maybe it’s the rest of the weights that the people on Behance were asking for. Bad Antonis. I’ll be more careful in the future.
#4 Paper Works
Paper Works is a handwritten (sort of) display font that’s perfect for packaging, book covers, posters and even branding. It comes in two styles (Regular and Outline) and you get no italics or extras.
I’ve made a couple of quick designs to showcase the versatility and whimsical papercraft-style character of the font, which wouldn’t be out of place in Yoshi’s Crafted World.
Unlike the rest of the fonts in this week’s feature, you have to pay cold, hard cash to be able to use this one. Thankfully, at the time of writing it’s at 50% off on MyFonts and even more thankfullier, we’ll be giving it away to one lucky winner this Friday as part of our weekly Free Font Fridays event. So if you still haven’t, just go on the main page, scroll to the bottom of the page if you can (hey, some reverse psychology never hurt anyone) and sign up for our biweekly newsletter.
In case you don’t want to receive emails from us (it’s OK, you absolute bastard) you can purchase Paper Works HERE for the prohibitively high cost of a couple of lattes.
#5 Losta Masta
Oh, boy.
I love Losta Masta. The font, a curvy serif with a ton of ligatures and a cool midcentury twist, came out very recently and it immediately won me over with its combination of class and pure, unadulterated femininity.
Call me a sexist, patriarchal, cis-gendered hydrophobic bastard but, honestly, this is most definitely not a masculine font.
This font is perfect for wedding invitations, feminine care products, perfumes and, in general, for projects for products and brands targeting women (and yes, wedding invitations do target women since most men wouldn’t mind having Comic Sans or Arial on theirs).
To showcase the font, I quickly made a promotional image for what could either be a church or a brothel:
Losta Masta costs about $20 on most shops, although if you’re fast you may still be able to get it on MightyDeals for the awesome price of $8. The clock is ticking, baby!
