Looking for a free Helvetica alternative aren’t you?
Whenever you’re making a simple logo or full-blown publication or a website you probably ponder on choosing a minimal, elegant and top-notch font family for your professional design. Searching through multiple typeface libraries and looking at all these pricey fonts gives you a headache and you want to stop. But it does not have to be this way — here are my personal favourite Helvetica-alike fonts free for commercial use! No more scrolling through an endless nightmare.
A little bit of a history
We all know Helvetica — probably the most sophisticated font of them all. Originally designed by Max Miedinger (with input from Eduard Hoffmann) in 1957 for Haas’sche Schriftgießerei — a Swiss manufacturer of foundry type. Today Max’s font has become one of the most famous fonts for its utterly designed characters.
We all know Helvetica — probably the most sophisticated font of them all. Originally designed by Max Miedinger (with input from Eduard Hoffmann) in 1957 for Haas’sche Schriftgießerei — a Swiss manufacturer of foundry type. Today Max’s font has become one of the most famous fonts for its utterly designed characters.
Here are my top five sans fonts based on a Helvetica typeface that can work well with your design. They are completely free for both home and commercial use.
TeX Gyre Heros
Within a package of TeX Gyre collection of fonts you can find this Helvetica replacement font designed by polish font designer Bogusław Jackowski specifically for the TeX e-foundry project. It contains Regular and Bold (along with italic and condensed versions) font weights only but it’s the perfect replacement for Swiss fonts. It’s the closest to Helvetica typeface I’ve ever found.
You can download it for free from GUST TeX Gyre Heros website.
Inter
Another great Helvetica alternative from a designer Rasmus Andersson who worked for many different companies, including Spotify, DropBox and Facebook. It has 18 styles and also ships as variable font! Rasmus designed it mainly for screens but you can use it on paper too! All these goodies are avaible for free!
You can download Inter font for free on Andersson’s website. His font is also available on Google Fonts.
Metropolis
Metropolis is a super-friendly font which resembles Google Sans family. Created by Chris Simpson it is great both for titles and plain text. Chris writes about his font:
A modern, geometric typeface. Influenced by other popular geometric, minimalist sans-serif typefaces of the new millenium. Designed for optimal readability at small point sizes while beautiful at large point sizes.
You can download Metropolis font from Chris’ GitHub page.
Montserrat
yet another geometric font similar to Helvetica (but wider) and other sans fonts. Developed by Julieta Ulanowsky. She launched it as a Kickstarter project in 2011, in order to complete the first public release and share it with the world through Google Fonts. Now thanks to Julieta we have it for free!
You can grab a free copy on Montserrat GitHub page. Julieta’s font is also available on Google Fonts.
Prompt
Prompt is a simple, wide and geometric font that was developed to work well with loopless Thai but it’s just as good in Latin alphabet as in Thai! Cadson designed 18 styles.
You can get it on Prompt GitHub page. It’s also available on Google Fonts.
