If picking the right font seems overwhelming, you’re not alone. Even seasoned professional designers often find it a challenge to sort through the seemingly limitless available font options. Fortunately, there are many free online font generators that can let you pick the right font or even customize it to suit your needs.
Online font generators can take the guesswork out of the equation, as they allow you to see what your text will look like before it’s finalized, and some even let you see how fonts look paired together.
They also allow you to download the font, which you can use in Venngage’s My Brand Kit. Together with your brand logos and colors, My Brand Kit helps ensure consistent branding for all your designs, reinforcing your brand and helping your audience recognize it at a glance.
But first, let’s take a look at what font generator is and the 14 best online font generators that you can use to pick the right fonts.
Click to jump ahead:
- What is a font generator?
- What types of font generators are available?
- How do you choose the right font?
- Best font generators
- Best unicode character generators
What is a font generator?
A font generator is a type of computer software that converts outline fonts into various types of files that can be used for websites or graphic design software. They can be used to create custom fonts, visualize font pairings and more.
What types of font generators are available?
“Font generator” is something of a blanket term for a couple of different tools. Some font generators allow you to customize a font or even create your own unique lettering that you can download and use in other computer programs.
Some font generators are accessible through your web browser, but there are a few that operate as standalone programs. Font generators can be used to create special text called unicode characters, which have become very popular for use in email marketing (more on these later).
How do you choose the right font?
Picking the right font for your design projects is more art than science. While some fonts are almost always wrong—Comic Sans and Papyrus—with the right topic, tone and theme, just about any font could be appropriate.
Of course, when it comes to business communications, you may be tied to a particular font family already, so finding one that works well with those can be challenging.
Here are the biggest considerations:
Legibility
This is the most important thing overall, but it’s also the least fun.
There are some lovely fonts, especially ones that look handwritten, that can be difficult to read. Before you fall in love with the look of a font, think about how large your text will be and if it will be legible at all sizes.
Content
The personality of the fonts you choose should match the content of your message, whether it’s an email, infographic, annual report or any other type of communication. Serious topics are not a good match for playful fonts and vice-versa.
Theme
If your topic is themed, consider a font that plays into that. Content related to holidays and seasons are a natural fit for a themed font.
As this infographic illustrates, every font creates its own mood based on its personality. This is a good starting point for thinking about what type of font is right for your purposes.
People also read:
- Choosing the Right Infographic Fonts for Business Communications
- Everything You Need to Know About Picking Brand Fonts
Best font generators
If you have a general idea of what fonts can work for your brand, let’s take a look at our recommended font generators. Here are the best font generators that can help you download fonts, allow you to customize how the letters look or even create your own.
Fontstruct
Fontstruct font creation tool
Fontstruct is a free online tool that lets you create your own font from scratch. Build each letter using the site’s web platform, including all 26 English characters in both upper and lower case, as well as numbers and special characters like asterisks and parenthesis.
When you’re done, just hit the download button at the top of the editor and the system will generate a TrueType font you can install on your computer or import into Venngage’s My Brand Kit and use for any of your designs.
Editing a cloned font
Some fonts created by the site’s users are clonable, meaning you can make your own versions of them with modifications, while others are available for download for personal or commercial use.
While you can create your own font, modifying an existing one is considerably easier. Fontstruct’s tool is free, but it’s more suited for people who already have some experiencing with creating fonts and typefaces.
Calligraphr
Calligraphr upload screen
Calligraphr is another online tool where users can create their own fonts that can be downloaded and installed for computers or for use in Venngage’s My Brand Kit.
How does this calligraphy font generator work? Here are the steps required:
- Create an account.
- Download a PDF of one of Calligraphr’s templates, which includes all the characters available in a given type of font. The free version of the tool supports a smaller number of characters, but pro users ($8 per month) can upgrade.
- Print the PDF and draw each of your letters in the spot assigned to that letter. As you can see in the image above, this relies on your own handiwork, quite literally.
- Once you’ve added all your letters, take a picture of the page or scan it and upload it under the My Fonts tab of your Calligraphr window editor.
- The system will populate with digitized versions of each letter, which you can tweak as you wish.
- When everything’s the way you want it, click Build Font and download the file.
While we went the cursive font generator route, users have created block fonts, serif fonts and many other types. The only limit is your creativity (and how much time you have on hand).
Brandmark Font Generator
Font Generator home page
Brandmark’s Font Generator is an excellent font generator for visualizing how different typefaces will look together. While it’s limited only to Google fonts, you can pick up to three different ones to see how the sample page changes.
Because the fonts are Google fonts, they are free, and you can simply follow links on the right side of the page to download them. If you’re planning to use these for web design, CSS code is generated for you too.
Click the arrows or the slider to see variations of your selections or try your luck with a random pairing.
Fontself
Fontself home page
Fontself is an extension you can purchase for Adobe Illustrator and/or Photoshop that will let you quickly turn lettering into OpenType fonts. It costs $39 for Illustrator of $59 for an Illustrator/Photoshop bundle, but the one-time fee includes free updates.
Since it’s made for Illustrator and Photoshop, two of the most popular paid graphic design tools out there, Fontself is definitely not for beginners. But if it’s important to have a truly custom typeface for your design projects, it may be worth considering.
Want to learn more about picking (or developing) an elegant font? Check out our elegant font guide to typefaces that will inject instant presence into your designs.
1001 Fonts
1001 Fonts home page
1001 Fonts is a popular resource for purchasing fonts and downloading free versions. Users can also type their text and see what it would look like in given typefaces. Narrow down different styles like bold, modern or headline to see options that fit those categories.
In some cases, fonts are available for purchase or donation, while some are free. Each one has a different license status, so be sure to make sure the one you want to use is cleared for your purposes.
Let’s say we wanted to replace the title font in this infographic:
Typing in our title, we can narrow down to options that create a different vibe based on their keywords. We could choose to find something similar or go in a completely different direction.
1001 Fonts title alternates
Fontmeme
FontMeme free commercial font list
Fontmeme has several cool tools for font lovers and designers. You can check out fonts used in pop culture and get your hands on some free fonts. One of the coolest tools offered by this font generator is identifying which fonts are used in a variety of pop culture.
Want to create a James Bond-style design or mimic the look of the sultry smash hit Netflix show “Bridgerton”? Fontmeme has you covered.
FontMeme identifying Bridgerton font
While some of the fonts it identifies aren’t free, Fontmeme shows you where you get them while offering some potential free alternatives.
And the text generator can let you create downloadable images, though you can’t download the fonts themselves through that tool.
Read more about how to ensure you’re picking brand fonts that will stick in the minds of consumers. (Bridgerton-level results not guaranteed.)
Dafont
Dafont home page
Dafont.com is another font repository site that offers a mix of free and paid fonts, though all of them are free for personal use. While you can’t generate your own font or modify any of the ones on offer, you can sort by dozens of different categories, narrowing in on the ones that fit your needs.
FontGet
FontGet is a unique best-of-both-worlds platform where you can try out different fonts for download as well as creating unicode text for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and emails. (More on unicode text in the next section).
This tool will let you try on tons of fonts to see if one will fit better. Let’s find a new body text font for this branding guideline:
Because the header font is a script, let’s keep with a sans serif for body and small header text. Let’s also narrow down to free options.
FontGet body text font replacement
Venngage for Business users can upload their favorite font into their My Brand Kit, which allows them to apply their brand fonts to any of their designs and make sure their branding is always on point.
Best unicode character generators
Unicode refers to a global standard for consistent representation and handling of computerized text used in most of the world’s languages. Unicode characters have become increasingly popular tools for use in social media and email marketing campaigns.
While they’re both related to computers, the big difference with unicode text is you don’t download anything, as opposed to a font, which you do need to download or add to the code of a website. Check out this free unicode character table to learn more.
Unicode character search
There are unicode characters assigned to emojis, fancy letters, symbols and more. With thousands of possible code combinations, it’s simply easier to use a unicode generator.
If you’ve ever gotten an email with a subject line that includes a sun, green dollar sign or some other tiny, animated character, it was probably created with a unicode character generator.
As we mentioned already, FontGet is a double-duty tool, allowing people to download fonts for offline use but also letting people generate Instagram-ready text.
Let’s look at some other helpful unicode character generators. This type of text is sometimes referred to as fancy text, cool text or Instagram text, but they’re all names for unicode text.
Qwerty
Qwerty unicode text generator
Qwerty‘s free online fancy text generator offers a total of 17 fonts that you can copy and paste into your subject lines, or even right in your articles, like this:
🅃🄷🄸🅂 🅂🄰🄻🄴 🄸🅂 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Lingojam
Lingojam font editor
Lingojam is a great option for unicode text if you don’t want to keep a unicode table up while you’re working. It also offers a customization option that lets you edit fonts. That means if you like one of the options it generates except for one thing, you can change the way it alters regular text.
Lingojam has tons of free options, so you probably won’t need to make any modifications and can just paste in your cool text.
Metatags
Meta Tags visual preview
Metatags gives you a couple dozen font options, and it lets you visualize how your text will look in a Twitter or Instagram bio. As with other unicode text generators, you can simply paste into your social channels or wherever the text will live.
☀ sᴜᴍᴍᴇʀ sᴀʟᴇ sᴛᴀʀᴛs ᴛᴏᴍᴏʀʀᴏᴡ! 🤑
Coolfont
Coolfont decorated text
Coolfont is a useful free tool not only for generating engaging unicode subject lines, text, bios, tweets and more but for adding simple decoration to them. Enter your text and let Coolfont offer decoration options like flowers, stars, heart emojis and much more.
Fontspace
FontSpace online font generator
FontSpace offers 12 cool font styles that can jazz up your Facebook messages or social media bios. With only a dozen options, it’s a little bit less useful and versatile than some of the other font generators on our list.
In summary: Tell your brand’s story by finding a great font or even creating one of your own
Once you’ve got the font locked down, load it into your My Brand Kit to ensure all the design assets you create in Venngage reinforce your brand.
Venngage for Business users can upload their own fonts to their Brand Kit:
And they can apply their brand colors, logos and fonts to any of their designs in one click:
Anyone can start designing by creating a free Venngage account and customizing our easy-to-edit templates that are suitable for all communications purposes—no design experience required.
Upgrade to a Business account to enjoy consistent branding for all your designs, as well as other team features such as real-time collaboration or commenting.