The big standbys have their place but using independent font foundries is a way to keep your designs fresh and your mind out of the box. So if you aren't shopping around it's time to diversify.
To get you started we´ve put together a list of our top ten Sans fonts from the Independent marketplace.
Isadora Sans
Isadora Sans
Foundry: Latinotype
Designer(s): Daniel Hernández, Paula Nazal and Enrique Hernández
Price: $$
Isidora Sans is a new version of the bestselling font Isidora created by Latinotype, a dynamic foundry based in Santiago, Chile. The new typeface has a cleaner and more geometric look, keeping the essence and structure of classic sans fonts yet with a fresh, clean and contemporary appearance. Isidora Sans consists of two subfamilies of 7 weights, ranging from Thin to Black, with matching italics, giving a total of 28 fonts. Isidora Sans is the perfect font for publishing, titles, books, magazines and corporate design. Its Alt version is ideal for logotypes, branding, packaging, and use on web and TV. The family also contains a set of 416 characters supporting 207 different languages.
Pangram Sans
Pangram Sans
Foundry: Pangram Pangram
Designer(s): Mathieu Desjardins
Price: $$
One of the great things about Pangram is that they generally give free access to quality fonts to everyone for personal use with licensing available to purchase for commercial projects. The idea is to allow those who use fonts the most (mostly designers) to play and work with them in their entirety and at the time of a commercial project, let their client/employer purchase the commercial license.
Pangram Sans is a well crafted and highly equipped sans serif typeface that has over 2800 meticulously crafted glyphs spread though seven gorgeous weights from ExtraLight to Black. Inspired by some of the greatest geometric typefaces this complete font family will surely be your next “go to” font and uplift your designs. 7 styles with 401 glyphs each combined with a Stylistic Set. Language support for the Americas and all of Europe.
Vanguard CF
Vanguard CF
Foundry: Connary
Designer(s): Connary Fagen
Price: $
Vanguard CF is a powerful and elegant display typeface, constructed to maximize horizontal space. Built from sketches originally drawn in 2012, Vanguard’s eight weights span an elegant Thin to an arresting Heavy, with accompanying obliques. As with its sibling Integral CF, Vanguard makes a strong impression in print, headlines, video, and social media – whether paired with a contrasting typeface or on its own.
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Ekster
Foundry: Naumoff
Designer(s): Ilya Naumoff
Price: $$$
Ekster is a geometric sans Serif font typeface from the Parisien Designer Ilya Naumoff. Many of its letters are simplified; you’ll find several places in the typeface where the connection of bowls to stems isn’t fussy, for example, and horizontal strokes – like those in the ‘f’ and the ’t’ along the x-height – don’t bisect their letters’ main vertical stems (but populate the left-hand side only instead). Ekster’s lowercase ‘u’ is also symmetrical.
The family includes a staggering number of weights – eight in total, and these range from Thin through Black. Each weight has both an upright font and an oblique-style italic on offer. The letterforms in all of the Ekster weights are drawn with virtually monolinear strokes. Ekster’s x-height is moderate, and the lowercase’s ascenders rise up to the same height as the capital letters and the numerals. However, the best feature of Ekster’s fonts is the large number of alternates that they contain. Ekster includes alternate forms for almost every lowercase letter, and some even have more than one alternate available – like the ‘a’, ‘e’, and ‘r’. Ekster is an excellent choice for use in both corporate design and editorial design projects, both because of its range of font weights and styles as well as because of its legibility in text.
Cera Pro
Foundry: TypeMates
Designer(s): Jakob Runge
Price: $$
The pan-European Cera Collection is driven by pure geometry and contains the bestselling Cera Pro, its stenciled counterpart Cera Stencil, the hand-crafted display companion Cera Brush and Cera Round Pro.
With six weights, a clean italic – carefully slanted 10 degrees – useful dingbats and arrows, Cera is a steadfast companion for when you need to set clean text and headlines in print, on screen and in multiple languages. For best on-screen performance, the TrueType files for web and desktop fonts have been manually hinted.
The pan-European Cera PRO supports the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts. With over 980 glyphs per weight, Cera cares about localised letterforms and has the OpenType features to match.
Clother
Clother
Foundry: Black
Designer(s): Jérémie Hornus, Julie Soudanne and Ilya Naumoff
Price: $$
Clother is a striking series of fonts built for use in branding, corporate design, and corporate communication. Its sans serif letterforms are geometric, and the fonts support dozens of languages, plus four different writing systems: Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Latin. This broad linguistic coverage, unified by a single graphic vocabulary, enables companies who use Clother to deploy their messages across a good portion of the global marketplace, all while maintaining a consistent visual style.
The Clother family includes four fonts: Light, Regular, Bold, and Black. Each font’s character set includes 997 glyphs. The letterforms feature more personality than you might expect from a geometric sans. This quality is particularly visible in the fonts’ lowercase “f”, “g”, and “y”, although the “K”, “k”, “W”, and “w” also have rather unique forms. Strengthening Clother’s geometric girding, its fonts’ lowercase “a” and “g” are single-storied. Like the open counters in the “f”, “g”, and “y”, they contribute to the very rounded feeling that is present throughout the fonts’ lowercase. Dots on the letters “i” and “j”, as well as the punctuation marks and dot-based diacritics, are drawn with circular forms. Clother’s letters have low stroke-contrast; they are almost monolinear in their appearance. The lowercase letters’ x-height is not particularly high, and the fonts’ ascenders are taller than the height of the capital letters. Clother’s default numerals are proportional lining figures, but tabular lining and proportional oldstyle figures are also included.
Kiona
Kiona
Foundry: NA
Designer(s): Ellen Luff and Tom Anders Watkins
Price: $
KIONA is simple but significant, and defined by its crisp edges and modern touches. It is designed for optimal legibility. An all caps sans-serif, KIONA makes a statement without making a scene.
Extreme Geometric
Extreme Geometric
Foundry: NA
Designer(s): Endre Mesaros
Price: $$
Typeface is a clean geometric sans serif, designed by Endre Mesaros. Inspired by 1920s typography, it has upper case letters, numbers and some alternative letters too.
Orkney
Orkney
Foundry: Hanken Design
Designer(s): Samuel Oakes
Price: $$$
Orkney is a geometric typeface designed and conceptualised by Samuel Oakes. The goal in creating the typeface was to have a unique yet functional typeface that can be used for a wide variety of projects on print or screen.
Geomanist
Geomanist
Foundry: Atipo
Designer(s): Raúl García del Pomar & Ismael González
Price: $
The Geomanist typeface has a contemporary sans design, clean and elegant, with a combination of geometric shapes and humanistic beat.
Geomanist was designed by Atipo®, a small multidisciplinary studio set up by Raúl García del Pomar & Ismael González in 2010 that offers honest and enduring graphic solutions, where the idea takes precedence over aesthetics. The beautiful Geomanist typeface comes in 18 font styles—from the elegant and delicate Thin weight to the extra strong Ultra weight. Each one, delicious.
Geomanist can be used for personal and commercial works, and can also be used as a webfont—for your website or web application. The regular font style is completely free to download, and the entire family is available as well.
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