The 8 Type Trends You Need to Know This Year
How to keep your digital projects feeling typographically fresh in 2020.
Not that long ago, digital typography was, well, pretty blahhh. Sure, some dedicated souls kept the old pillars of analog type standing by rasterizing headlines, drop caps, sidebars, captions… you get the idea. And maybe you were that person. But then came the responsive design zealots, the load-time obsessed devs, and the SEO town criers. Deep down, even the typographers knew they were right, that the magic of the web was accessibility and distribution. So they bowed down to the CMS gods and filled their plates with system fonts and the ubiquitous Proxima Novas of the world.
But much has changed since then. The noose has loosened. Your Apple Watch’s tiny screen is nearly 2.5x sharper than your first-gen iPad’s once-impressive display, making it more plausible than ever to render detail and nuance. That means the typophiles waiting in the wings are back to work making digital type sing. Sharp serifs! Precise sans! Curvaceous retro re-boots! Read on and discover the best-of-the-best trends 2020’s new era of digital typography will bring.
Brands are realizing they need more than just a great product to make it in 2020, they need a great story. Say no more. We know how to deliver that message: serifs! Serifs are synonymous with storytelling. And a growing crop of killer serifs, especially ones with contrasting humanistic strokes that we’ll call humanized serifs, like Coconat from Collletttivo, are dialing up the mood to a Spinal Tap eleven and making a fresh-new-thing of the oldest font category on the planet (serifs, that is). Use a humanized serif the next time you want to tell a story that’s rooted in tradition, but filtered through a bright new lens.
Extended typefaces have always said to their readers, “Whooaaa there, bucko, slow down. Our corral is worth takin’ in.” That sentiment never changed, but deploying extra-wide faces became tricky in a world full of vertical screens. Recently, studios like Bonjour Monde have released extended fonts, like Syne, that are so appealing designers can’t help but find a way to use them. And because extra-wide fonts spent a few years MIA in digital design, they are looking fresher than ever in 2020. Use an extended typeface next time you need to let an audience know you’ve got some roses for them to stop and smell, and it’ll be worth their time.
Was it Stranger Things? BlacKkKlansman? Maybe it was our collective mourning of the final Star Wars episode? Whatever kicked it off, 1970s retros, like Goudy Heavyface from Bitstream, are finding new wind in 2020. And for good reason, considering their snug character sets and curvaceous ligatures carry the mood of an era when free livin’ was a slightly simpler and less fraught enterprise. If that means more Gen-Zers are diving into the pioneering work of Herb Lubalin, the godfather of custom display type and expressive logotypes, we’re all about it. Use these retros the next time you need to speak to nostalgic, neon-lit American freedom.
The history of slab serif is rooted in the Industrial Revolution, emerging from the poster and newspaper print shops of the time. The bold, rectangular extensions of a slab serif look forged rather than written, stamped rather than scripted. These days we spend most of our working hours in comfortable, temperature-controlled offices. But a growing distrust of our digital age (read: sedentary) has breathed new life into sweat-on-your-brow, working class slab serifs. Designers like Aoife Mooney and her BioRhyme font are delivering big time with smart, energetic new interpretations. Use a bold slab serif for your next project that needs to say, “Let’s get to work.”
“Well this plain-Jane font doesn’t look so trendy to me,” might be your first thought. Fair enough, but dig deeper and you’ll see that the Noto font family embodies very 2020 trends of inclusion and transparency. (Let’s be clear, we’re talking typography here, not global politics. Unfortunately.) Noto is Google’s front-line fight against web “tofu” — those ubiquitous rectangular shapes substituted for missing characters. The result is the most globally considered and linguistically complete collection with character sets for 800+ languages in a single family. Use Noto Sans and the Noto font family when you’re working on a multinational project or when you want to convey inclusive values.
First, let’s acknowledge that defining a typeface as brutalist is a bit fraught. Brutalism is, in the contemporary graphic sense, a purposeful tension between seemingly raw elements. Typographically, this can mean pairing traditionally contrasting fonts. Which is to say, we accept the idea that any typeface can contribute to a brutalist design. And yet, we find a growing number of fonts, like Miratrix from Andrey Karter, to wonderfully embody the ideals of rawness, tension, and undisguised structure that is the brutalist aesthetic. So try a brutalist font the next time you want to convey an unapologetic frankness. And P.S., the term “brutalism” derives from the French phrase béton brut, meaning raw concrete, not the English adjective.
The world is getting busier — more people, more information, more everything. And believe it or not, some people felt the same overload way back in the 1920s. Enter stage right: geometric sans serifs, which took simplicity, order, and standardization to the next level. (Actually, geometric typefaces were born out of socio-political ideals of Constructivism, but the style was quickly adopted by the West, minus the politics.) Today we’re seeing crisp new cuts of geometric typefaces, like Gilroy from Radomir Tinkov. These fonts are benefactors of the ever-shaper displays all around us, which retain the precision of the characters. Use a geometric sans serif when you want to express a confidence and cutting-edge organization.
Noticed something new in your font menu lately? The word ‘variable’ is now attached to a growing number of fonts. A variable fonts feature user-adjustable properties, such as contrast, width, thickness, and an imaginative host of others. A handful of designers, like David Berlow, have diligently been turning variable type experiments into a viable reality, like Decovar. And recently, some big names — Adobe, Monotype, Google — have jumped on board the variable bus. The magic is in delivering one single font file rather than two, or four, or 4000. But the fun is only limited to the collective imagination of the type community. Consider a variable font when efficiency is important or when detail control is a priority.
This article originally appeared on Ceros Originals. If you like what you’re reading, be sure to head over and experience our latest interactive stories for design professionals now.
Additional research by Jeremiah McNair.
