Top Fonts      

Top Fonts

Arial. Times New Roman. Comic Sans. Everyone’s heard of them, and for the most part, these are the fonts used for every essay, lab report, and homework assignment. When people are looking to be dramatic, they delve into the other preloaded fonts, like Calibri or maybe even Garamond. 

To be fair, all of these options are legible and (with the exception of Comic Sans) fairly professional looking. Still, when it comes to the near-endless assignments of high school, they can get boring and repetitive. 

If you’re looking to change things up, here are my Top 9 Body Fonts:

Serif = Font with embellishments (“serifs”) as the end of the letters, such as Times New Roman.

Sans Serif = A font without serifs, such as Arial.

9. Libre Caslon Display

Libre Caslon Text, designed by the organization Impallari Type and lettered by Igino Marini. Although this serif font is officially optimized for headlines and titles, I personally like it for body text as well, as it is more graceful than its text counterpart (Libre Caslon Text). Caslon fonts are based on the work of William Caslon I and II, but this specific font took influence from Caslon-inspired hand lettering in 1950s advertisements. Google logs it at less than 3 million uses in the last week (while more popular fonts like Roboto log over 70 billion), and it is an elegant font to use even on the most simple assignments. 

8. Cabin Condensed

Cabin Condensed came highly recommended to me by a friend. It is a condensed sans serif font, meaning that the letters are closer together and thinner than they would normally be, and there are no embellishments (“serifs”) at the end of the lines. It is a part of the larger Cabin family (designed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida with influences from Edward Johnston and Eric Gill), which also includes the display font Cabin Sketch. It has less than 25 million uses weekly, while the Cabin font itself has about 300 million. 

7. Average

If you’re looking for something that isn’t Times New Roman, but also isn’t too fancy, Average is a good choice. Designed by Eduardo Tunni, Average is quite literally the average of the shapes, sizes, and serifs of hundreds of other historical fonts. (There is also a sans serif counterpart, aptly named Average Sans). As this font is so “average”, it isn’t as interesting or glamorous as other serifs, but it is more unique than Times New Roman without being too much. 

6. Darker Grotesque

Darker Grotesque is a Vietnamese font designed by ViệtAnh Nguyễn and Gabriel Lam. It is a relatively small, rounded sans-serif font with many available variations, including Light, Normal, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold, Extra Bold, and Black. This makes it useful for essays that need different titles, subtitles, and headings, although font size may need to be adjusted to accommodate the relatively small size. It logs less than 10 million weekly uses on Google, was released in 2019, and has language support in 416 languages. 

5. Arapey

Another fairly simple but elegant serif is Arapey (ah-ra-pay), designed by Eduardo Tunni and named after a small town in Uruguay where the first designs were made. It has logged 12.5 million weekly uses on Google, and includes “soft lines and finishes”. It should be noted that Arapey tends to run fairly small, and so font sizes may need to be adjusted to make sure your paper is easy to read. Still, it’s a graceful serif that is notably different from standard fonts like Times New Roman. 

4. Cormorant

The Cormorant family, and their many variations, are one of the more mainstream fonts on this list, with almost 74 million uses in the past week. The family was designed by Christian Thalmann, loosely based on Garamond fonts. This font is very useful for presentations or designs, as it has so many variations, including: Cormorant Garamond, Cormorant Unicase, and Cormorant Upright, as well as Light, Normal, Medium, Semi Bold, and Bold options for each. All of these work well together and keep presentations cohesive, while not forcing you to use the same font for the entire project. 

3. Bellota Text

Bellota Text is a versatile sans serif font, designed by Kemie Guaida, and one that is more visually appealing than something like Arial. It logs less than 4 million uses per week, and has many variations, including light, normal, and bold color options, as well as a “swash caps” version for title or display uses. It is very legible (as sans serif fonts tend to be) without being boring, and is the highest-ranked sans serif font on this list! 

2. Lora

Lora is a fairly basic serif font, designed by Olga Karpushina and distributed by the foundry Cyreal. It has a large array of characters, including the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, as well as numbers, fractions, currency symbols, and punctuation. Lora was released in 1911, and is logged by Google as having around 920 million uses per week. It has language support for 311 languages, was designed to be easily readable on a screen, and is one of the more easily legible serif fonts. 

1. Goudy Bookletter 1911

Coming in at number 1 (and my personal favorite) is Goudy Bookletter 1911, designed by Barry Schwartz. The Goudy font family originated in the early 1900s, and was originally created by Frederic W. Goudy for the American Type Founders. This particular font was released in 2009, but is trying to copy the style of earlier fonts, in that all the letters fit together. It is also fairly obscure, with Google logging less than 5 million uses in the last week (while more popular fonts like Roboto log over 70 billion). Overall, Goudy Bookletter 1911 works well for English or other writing assignments (per the “bookletter” name), but is also just satisfying to type in, as the letters all use similar angles and patterns in their serifs.