1950's Mid Century Font

50 Best Free Retro and Vintage Fonts

High-quality free retro fonts are hard to find – especially retro and vintage fonts. But high quality free font downloads do exist; it just takes time to find them.

To help, we've created an epic collection of 50 free and premium retro and vintage fonts for designers. Bookmark, and browse through, whenever you next need the perfect typeface for a new project.

(Elsewhere on the site, you'll also find all the high-quality brushes, textures, actions, smart PSDs, and other retro and vintage design goods you could ever need).

In this list, you'll find the very best free retro script fonts, calligraphy fonts, cursive fonts, handwritten fonts and more so you can create the best retro lettering design.

Some of the retro and vintage fonts are free for personal use but not for commercial projects – be sure to read the license, and support these hard-working designers by buying a commercial license when appropriate.

Read on for our hand-picked selection of 50 free retro and vintage fonts (and save yourself the trouble of digging through tens of thousands of fonts)...

More Retro Articles You'll Love

• RetroSupply Fonts (starting at $1)
• The RetroSupply Brush Guide for Illustrators
• Best Retro and Vintage Photoshop Tutorials
• The Best Free Retro and Vintage Textures

Palm Canyon Drive is a popular monoline script typeface inspired by retro matchbook covers, travel postcards, Tikki bars and Hollywood. With a classy but unpretentious tone, Palm Canyon Drive is as comfortable on a Tikki bar matchbook cover as it is on a Hollywood movie poster – and you can pick up one of the weights for free.

A Roman-serif with a classic bookish feel to it. Restora is at home as a display typeface in a modern novel or used to evoke the nostalgia of 1970s and early 80s publishing. Unbelievably, this font comes with over 700 characters and a massive amount of alternate characters.

Another free retro font from FontFabric, Intro is a strong yet elegant in-line geometric font. It's free for both personal and commercial work, and if you want the full font, you can purchase it from $29.

Designed by Mariano Diez, Rousseau Deco is an Art Deco inspired sans serif font harkening back to the Jazz Age and fine barrel aged whiskeys. It includes multilingual characters as well as alternates for O, R, and S.

Rousseau type is available under an Open Font License.

Wildfire is a humble, all caps, sans serif script font that works great for your projects needing to evoke the feel of a roaring comforting fire.

This retro national park inspired display font contains surprise descenders and other flair that pairs perfectly over curved paths for logos, badges, and type based designs. Wildfire is a premium font.

If you're after a decorative free retro font, try Stiff Staff. Designed by Bulgaria-based Borislav Petrov, the font features clean lines and distinctive angles that give a nod to constructivism. Rough it up for your Post-Punk and Metal inspired projects.

Stiff Staff is available free for personal and commercial use.

Paraline is an inline sans serif font reminiscent of Stranger Things, Atari, and all things 70s and 80s. The elegant shapes of each letter would equally find themselves home on a 1920s marquee as a cool modern arcade bar.

Paraline is available free for both personal and commercial work.

Ailerons

Adilson Gonzales de Oliveira Jr.

According to Brazil-based graphic designer Adilson Gonzales de Oliveira Junior, Ailerons was inspired by aircraft models from the 40s.

Ailerons has a clean, stylish, retro vibe, and an unusual mix of sharp and rounded edges. The font was created for an experimental design project but now available for personal use.

This geometric all-caps font from Madrid-based designer Ion Lucin comes in two versions: bold and ultra light.

Together the pair provide an eye-catching contrast that could be applied to stunning effect in all kinds of retro and vintage projects. Big John / Slim Joe comes with numerals and glyphs, and is free for both personal and commercial use.

Jack Harvatt's rounded sans serif has two weights, light and bold, and is free for personal use. It includes a set of extended glyphs, and is a perfect font for your Kubrick inspired sci-fi projects or your modern corporate branding presentations.

Moon is available free for personal use, with a commercial license available for £20.

I was digging through my grandparent's garage in Los Altos, California and came across tons of old electrical packaging.

I pulled together a collection of some of my favorite boxes and turned the font into Transistor. A true retro font inspired by history. This is a premium font.

Laura Pol's retro-futuristic free font Aqua Grotesque has a mysterious feel to it. It comes in one weight, regular, and doesn't have any glyphs - but if you're looking to add a scientific edge to your retro and vintage designs, it can do the job. Aqua Grotesque is available for personal and commercial use.

Far Out is a stylized semi-serifed display font with the look of 1960s variety shows. Equally at home in a retro style design as it is on a modern social media branding.

Far Out is designed by Gabi Bacani and is available for free for personal and commercial use.

Roasted is a rounded, hand-crafted mono-weight family including dozens of alternates and flourishes for any project you'd like to give down to earth gourmet flavor.

A perfect retro font pair for branding and headings. Roaster is a premium font.

A Buenos Aires-based Ezeqviel Ergo created Obake, a free font that works well for headlines.

Obake is a textured, condensed sans serif with a retro drop shadow. Bring an aged feel to your designs with ease.

Free for personal projects and available for complete license.

Whisholder is a Victorian-style vintage font inspired by signs, product packaging, and labels of the era. Perfect for use in branding projects, whiskey labels, old fashioned stationary and more.

Whisholder is available for personal use with commercial license available starting at $23.

German graphic designer Ludwig Übele is giving away two extreme weights - heavy and hairline - of his beautiful geometric font Helsinki, which is inspired by the Finnish traffic sign typeface. The free fonts cover the Western and Central European character set, and come for desktop and web. Options for the full font set are available starting at €39.

Sometimes you need a quietly retro font: say hello to Supria Sans, by HVD Fonts' Hannes von Döhren.

Inspired by the utilitarian clarity of Swiss type design, Supria Sans is an easy-to-read workhorse of a font. Get the regular and regular italic weights for free with an Adobe Creative Cloud membership.

Perfect for headlines and large display type, this retro-inspired slab serif has a modern twist. It was created by designer Kady Jesko and is free for both commercial and personal use.

Designer Jeremy Vassey created this free condensed font. Cast Iron has a geometric structure and industrial aesthetic. Ideal for high-impact logos or headlines. Available in both sans and sans-serif versions.

Free for personal and commercial use.

Add a touch of elegance to your retro designs or illustrations with free, geometric, sans serif font Noir, created by Switzerland-based designer Matthias Guggisberg.

Noir is available for free for personal and commercial use.

A classic serif font inspired by signs used during labor strikes in the 1950s and 1960s. A great choice for protest signs, letterhead, and business cards where a retro touch is needed.

Labor Union, shared by McLetters, is available for free for personal and commercial use.

WT Bradford was made by Winston Type Co. and has the distinct vintage feel of early 20th century trade cards, circulars, and signage. Perfect for signs, branding, labels, and other consumer goods that need a feel of history and tradition.

WT Bradford Basic is available free for personal and commercial use. It consists of capital letters and numbers in the classic style. A premium version is available with three styles, ligatures, alternates, and catchphrases.

Swiss designer Philippe Moesch is the brains behind Sabo, a pixel-style retro font available in two styles - inline and filled - and perfect for an arcade-style game.

Sabo is available for a "name your own price" royalty free license.

Profonts studio took Swiss designer Hermann Eidenbenz's idea of a very narrow, economic headline font to the next level with Graphique Pro Next. There are eight weights for this classic font family, and you can get Graphique Pro Next Comp free for personal and commercial use. Package options for the remaining seven fonts are available for $39.

Get Five Free Retro Fonts Here

Grab five of our most popular retro fonts for free. Fonts are packaged in one easy to download ZIP file. Includes OTF files, license, and we'll even send you some more free retro fonts and resources for the next few days after you sign up.

Eskool is a fresh serif font similar to classic retro typewriter font families. It has its finger on the pulse of a wildly popular design aesthetic of 90s grade school products. Eskool pairs perfectly with the bright, geometric shapes which typify this style.

Designed by Saksham Verma and including over 100 glyphs, Eskool is available free for personal use.

Alt Retro is an eye-catching, multi-lined, five-weight typeface that oozes retro charm. Created by Cyprus-based designer Andreas Leonidou, Volume Dealers is available for free for personal use and for $20 if you'd like to use it commercially.

HKNY nails the look of the kind of lettering you might see painted on a pop-up brewery or arthouse film poster. It is an SVG font which means when you use it they'll be transparent in some areas emulating the look of real painted hand lettering. HKNY is an all caps sans-serif font available free for personal use and starts at $28 for commercial use.

TOOM is the all in one comic font of your dreams. Designed by Christopher Sperandio and based on the EC Comics system of the 1950s, this creepy classic comes in three line weights and is full of spook-takular extras like skulls and excitement lines. TOOM is a premium font.

A reversed-stress typeface designed for display use, Orwellian is guaranteed to add atmosphere to your designs. It was inspired by the concepts explored in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, and is another font that comes with a pay-what-you-want personal use license.

Milestone is a simple script font inspired by baseball and sign-painting history perfect for packaging, logos, or anything that you'd want to give a sophisticated yet accessible feel. A sample version is available free for personal use.

Sho-Card-Caps is well-suited to drop caps and headlines. An adaptation of standard 1930s font Futura Display, it's inspired by "hand-lettered posters from a bygone era" says designer Nick Curtis.

Sho-Card-Caps is available free for personal and commercial work.

Get the minimalist fonts of modern Swiss design. Then put it through a paper shredder, dump fish sauce on it, and leave it in the sun for a few days. The result is Swiss Grit. The perfect font for punk rock posters, zines, and any other work in need of a trashy DIY feel.

Swiss Grit is free for personal use and available for commercial use starting at $20.

Fenwick is a stunning sans serif, display font family published by Typodermic Fonts Inc. Of the eight weights available, Fenwick Outline is free for personal and commercial use under a desktop license. The extended family of fonts is available starting at $9.95.

This angular geometric free font is a versatile creation that's well-suited to a variety of uses, from graphic design to motion and apparel.

Lot is available free for personal and commercial use.

The first ever typeface from lettering artist Simon Walker, Matchbook is characterized by extended forms and rounded serifs, and includes a textured version reminiscent of vintage letterpress type. It has a pay-what-you-want personal use license, or you can get a commercial license starting at $30.

A thick Art Deco-inspired font created by DonMarciano. Camar is perfect for postcards, premium food packaging, and other projects that need clean bold design with a classic vintage touch. It is available free for personal use with commercial licenses starting at $20.

A premium letterpress family with rectangular letterforms and authentic, hand-crafted texture, Sucrose is a distressed font with two free weights. It is available free for personal use with commercial options available starting at $20.

According to designer Brian Bonislawsky, Yesteryear is a "flat nib connecting script font" loosely based on the title screen from 1942 film, The Palm Beach Story. Free for both commercial and personal use under a SIL Open Font License, it has a sharper feel than the source and is reminiscent of the chrome scripts of vintage automobilia.

Graphic designer Ben Dalrymple's Avril font features strong lines with rounded, soft terminals. The result is a versatile collection of strong, friendly letterforms, which you can use with a pay-what-you-want personal use license. Commercial licenses start at $5.

Based on 1960s advertisement scripts, Måns Grebäck's elegant vintage font Yaquote is is a perfect free cursive font when you need an understated look that won't distract from the main message.

Yaquote is free for personal use with a commercial license available for €59/$69.

Like Yaquote, but prefer a font with a more distressed design? Esplanade Script - also by Måns Grebäck - is perfect for when you need some vintage calligraphy handwriting.

Esplanade Script is available free for personal use with commercial licensing options available for €59/$69.

Ranger is a weighty display face with pointed spurs created by designer Evan Huwa. This classic Western motel style font comes in four styles, and has a pay-what-you-want personal use license. Commercial use is available starting at $25.

Alexey Frolic's wide contemporary slab serif Silverflake balances an old-style vibe with modern curves for a retro, yet up-to-date aesthetic. The all-caps font is free for personal and commercial use, and contains some alternative characters.

A nod to old concert posters and display cards, Right Price is a classic display font created by Australian illustrator Travis Price.

This collection of regular, inline, and bold typefaces is perfect for logos, sale announcements, or whatever needs some "Old Skool Flavor." Right Price is a premium font. Available starting at $29 for personal and commercial use.

This pack comes with 7 font files that gives you a great assortment of different fonts to try out to create any logo or posters. The lettering is perfect to grab anyone's attention and bring you a great vintage feel to your designs.

Berg is available free for personal and commercial use.

Portia is a beautiful film-noir inspired typeface by Ochaya Designs perfect for evoking the mystery, class, and nostalgia of this classic vintage period in cinema. It is available free for personal use only with commercial options available starting at $16.

Looking for the perfect typeface to create a vintage logo, branding or packaging project? Step up Sonder, a curvy free font that comes with both serif and sans-serif characters, in distressed and non-distressed form, and in black, bold and regular weights. A sample version is available for free, and the full typeface can be purchased for commercial use starting at $15.

The LogMAR chart is the chart you see at the optometrist office to test your eyes. Optician Sans is a font inspired by historical eye charts bring a classic, intellectual touch to your next project. Optician Sans is available for free under a SIL Open Font License.

Get Five Free Retro Fonts Here

Grab five of our most popular retro fonts for free. Fonts are packaged in one easy to download ZIP file. Includes OTF files, license, and we'll even send you some more free retro fonts and resources for the next few days after you sign up.

1950's Mid Century Font

Source: https://www.retrosupply.co/blogs/retrosupply-blog/best-free-retro-and-vintage-fonts

Posted by: russellfaidle.blogspot.com

Share this post