Fonts for logos and wordmarks
Geometric, rounded, wide and classical open-license typefaces with enough character to carry a name on their own.
Northwind
A wordmark is a handful of letters that will be seen thousands of times, often tiny: a browser tab, an app icon, the corner of a receipt. So the test for a logo typeface is different from the test for a text face. You are not judging the whole alphabet. You are judging the six or eight letters in the name, and how they sit next to each other.
Type the actual name before you decide anything. Look for awkward pairs, such as a gap after a capital T or two round letters crowding each other, and check whether the name works in both capitals and lowercase. Simple, even strokes survive small sizes and single-color printing better than fine hairlines do. Distinctive details help memory: a single-story a, an unusual G, a very wide stance. Since a logo usually needs supporting type for a tagline or a website, a family with several weights is a practical advantage. Open licenses permit modifying the outlines, which matters because nearly every finished wordmark has adjusted spacing or a redrawn letter.
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Outfit
Made as a company brand typeface: a geometric sans across nine weights from Thin to Black.
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Montserrat
Wide geometric capitals in 18 styles, enough to build a wordmark and its supporting text from one family.
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Raleway
Began as a single thin weight; now nine weights with italics, with a light end suited to refined marks.
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Quicksand
Rounded geometric letters from Light to Bold for soft, approachable names.
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Space Grotesk
Keeps the quirks of the fixed-width face it derives from, giving plain words a recognizable texture.
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Playfair Display
High stroke contrast at large sizes for editorial, fashion and cultural names.
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Comfortaa
Circular bowls and rounded strokes drawn for large sizes, with a weight axis from 300 to 700.
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Righteous
A geometric deco face in one weight, drawn on a grid after poster capitals.
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Cinzel
All-capitals letters modeled on first-century Roman inscriptions, variable from Regular to Black.
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League Spartan
A geometric sans variable from 100 to 900, with a heavy end that makes compact marks.
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Josefin Sans
An x-height at half the cap height gives lowercase wordmarks a 1920s elegance.
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Montserrat Alternates
Montserrat with special letterforms, such as an arched A and a single-story a, for a less familiar mark.
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Unbounded
Letters about as wide as they are tall, so a short name fills a line; eight weights without italics, for Latin and Cyrillic.
Samples load a basic Latin subset of each family. Every family here carries an open license; its page states the terms and offers the original files.
Questions about fonts for logos and wordmarks
Can I use an open-license font in a logo I trademark?
The licenses used here, the SIL Open Font License and, for one family, Apache 2.0, allow commercial use, including in logos, and place no claim on artwork made with the font. Trademark registration is a separate matter about the mark itself; for that, ask a trademark professional.
May I modify the letters for my wordmark?
Yes. Converting text to outlines and reshaping it is normal logo practice, and open licenses allow it. Restrictions concern redistributing a modified font file under a reserved name, which a logo does not do.
Should a logo font also be the website font?
It can be, if the family has text weights. Many brands instead use the logo face only for the mark and headings, with a quieter family for paragraphs.