12 Best Calligraphy Fonts for Your Design Needs

People in coffeehouse bar By Flashvector

Creative Market January 21, 2022 · 7 min read

Thinking of using a calligraphy font for your next design? We got it covered for you!

Calligraphy fonts resemble the appearance of elegant handwriting, which makes them look like they’ve been drawn using pens or brushes.

They are classified under script fonts and they often come with realistic effects such as drips, spots, and blotches. They also work best as a display font.

Due to their unique, stylistic design, using calligraphic fonts lets you create a more personalized, aesthetically pleasing design. If you are looking for a calligraphy font for professional purposes or you really want to take your typography to the next level, here is a compilation of the best calligraphy fonts from Creative Market that are available for both personal and commercial use, along with inspiration and ideas on how you can use them for your designs:

Gothic Calligraphy Fonts

Gothic typefaces evolved from early manuscript writing which has been around since the middle ages. They can be recognized by their dramatic, angular strokes with thick and thin stroke widths as well as elaborate, swirly serifs on uppercase letters and thin, diagonal serifs on lowercase letters.

Inspired by these dark, saturated, and ornate lettering styles from the medieval era, gothic calligraphy fonts are now known as Blackletter typefaces that combine elements of grunge with medieval letterforms. Here are some examples:

1. Quite Word: Modern Blackletter Display Font

This medieval-inspired font from Typia Nesia features a modern take on gothic fonts by taking out the swirly serifs and keeping the original angular form. Highly stylized yet legible, you can use this gothic calligraphy font to design cool logos, apparel, and other promotional materials for a rock band, fantasy book, or medieval-themed video game:

2. Ribolla Blackletter Font

Gothic fonts can convey elegance and timelessness in your designs. Ribolla is a stylish blackletter font that perfectly balances and complements its bold weight with its soft and smooth strokes. This font is ideal for a tattoo shop, boutique, or book store, this gothic calligraphy font can give your brand a classic and sophisticated look.

3. Black Mild Typeface

Meanwhile, this Old English font has a neat, structured design and swirly alternates to help you achieve a vintage, polished look. Black Mild Typeface is perfect for creating stationery and Western-themed designs as well as for branding old-fashioned, traditional businesses like breweries, tailor shops, and antique stores.

Modern Calligraphy Fonts

With modern calligraphy, you don’t have to stick to traditional or conventional styles or follow any particular strokes and formations. A modern calligraphy font rejects uniformity and embraces irregularity and imperfections to create a completely new and unique typeface, providing you with more freedom and creativity in your designs. Here are some modern calligraphy fonts you can try:

4. Heritage Dreams

This elegant serif font – which is also a blackletter typeface, has a unique stroke design that creates a semi-gothic look with a modern twist. The diagonal crossbars, stylized stems, protruding serifs, and tighter kerning all add up to produce a sleek, contemporary calligraphy font that you can use to create classy designs for a jewelry store or other luxury brands.

5. Thirtylane: A Modern Script

Moving away from stiff, formal-looking fonts, retro-style fonts such as the Thirtylane font can give your design a contemporary, more laid-back look and feel. This beautiful script font is specifically designed for creating attractive logos, titles, labels, and packaging. It also looks great on stationery, books, and magazines.

6. Hargael: Vintage Script & Sans Font Duo

Create a classic design by using vintage fonts with a modern look. This vintage-inspired modern calligraphy font is a combination of a minimal sans serif font and a cursive script font. It has OpenType features for displaying alternate uppercase and lowercase characters with extended tails or swashes to make text look more expressive.

Hargael font can be used to create fancy cafe or restaurant logos, elegant product packaging, or even iconic t-shirt designs.

Handwritten Calligraphy Fonts

Handwriting or hand lettering calligraphy fonts are those with a handmade feel and realistic attributes that can add a personal touch to your designs. Not only are they more attractive and unique, but they are also more effective at conveying moods and emotions, which can help you connect better with your target audience. Check out these stunning handwritten calligraphy fonts that you can use to create inspired designs:

7. Better Lovely

Here’s a beautiful hand-lettered calligraphy font that has exquisitely connected letters on top of ligatures, stylistic alternates, ornaments, and swashes. Its long and wild ascenders and descenders make it look like the characters are no longer following any baseline, making it look like a true free handwriting font. This elegant font is perfect for creating dreamy wedding invitations, inspiring quote pictures, and luxurious wordmark logos.

8. Layttona: Stylish Monoline

This playful calligraphy font has natural flowing cursive characters, seamless ligatures, and alternates with creative swashes for a more authentic handwritten look. Layttona has strokes with a consistent thickness that form gorgeous curves and fluid lines to resemble continuous handwriting. This monoline font can help you create stylish designs with a friendly vibe to suit your fashion or beauty brand

9. Spadoya: Modern Brush Font

A casual handwritten font, Spadoya is a hand-brushed font made using real brush and ink to bring an organic feel to your text. The regular and swash variations work in perfect harmony with the alternate characters to help you produce original typographic creations. With delicate strokes and a textured appearance, this brush calligraphy font is perfect for designing beautifully handwritten logos, blog titles, greeting cards, and wedding invitations.

Japanese Calligraphy Fonts

Japanese calligraphy or shodo is the traditional art of writing by hand using a brush dipped in ink to create Japanese characters and symbols. Making Japanese calligraphy is a skill that is passed down from one generation to the next and requires a lot of training. It functions as both an art form and a means of communication that illustrates beauty and balance in writing. Here are calligraphy fonts that emulate this beautiful art form:

10. ONAMURA: An Experimental Serif Font Family

With gothic and art nouveau elements as well as an Ukiyo-e style taken from Japanese woodblock prints and paintings from the Edo period, the ONAMURA font is an artistic fusion of old Western and Japanese writing styles. Consisting of 10 fonts with weights ranging from light to ultra-bold to black, this font family is perfectly suited for high-impact headlines both online and on print, making it ideal for designing magazines and websites.

11. Shakuro Brush Typeface

The Japanese language has three alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Inspired by the Kanji writing system, this brush calligraphy font with stiff brush strokes and glyph variations that create unique, textured letterforms displays a creative, modern take on Japanese calligraphy. This font is perfect for creating Japanese-themed logos, websites, menus, and product packaging.

12. Ungai

Finally, this Japanese font draws its roots from the Katakana script and features big characters with bold, wider strokes and a consistent stem thickness that can instantly grab attention.

Ungai is a fun Japanese-style calligraphy font that you can use to create a Japanese aesthetic for your restaurant branding, digital artworks, video game design, or travel brochures.

Make sure to use these calligraphy fonts for your display text to make your designs and content more attractive and engaging.