Retro Fonts

By structure they are mixed: 55 display, 24 serif, 10 decorative, 3 pixel and 6 from other categories, out of 98 in all. Display is the most common structure here, 55 fonts or more than half of the page, each of them also listed on Display Fonts. For a free download, start with Bellbottom Serif, Circuit Outline and Display Retro Bubble and 4 more: they are in the free collection, while the other 91 of these retro fonts need Pro, Studio or a Font Pass. Each of them ships as one Regular style; none has a separate bold or light weight. Other labels that recur across the set: poster on 78, bold on 72, vintage on 58 and geometric on 48. 79 of them come in 14 groups drawn on a shared letter structure; the largest includes Anvil Slab 3D, Beacon Slab and Frontier Tuscan, which differ in effect, slant or width rather than in their basic letter shapes.

Velocity Stripes leans the most, about 10°; across the retro fonts with a measurable angle, 3 of 44 lean right with a median of 10° and 41 stand upright; the other 54 have strokes too varied to give one angle. From narrowest to widest, Dugout Script sets an average lowercase letter at 57.5% of the cap height and Monolith Slab at 115.1%, 2.0 times as wide. For the retro fonts as a group the median is 92.9%, 15% wider than the 80.4% median of the whole library, so the same words take a longer line than in an average library font. Measured against their capitals, the retro fonts here put the top of the lowercase between 48.4% and 100% of the cap height, 75.8% at the median; the library median is 71.8%, and 1 has lowercase as tall as the capitals. By ink coverage, Bubble Tech Outline is the lightest of these retro fonts at 13.5% of each letter's box and Display Retro Bubble the darkest at 61.1%; the median here, 40.2%, is 15% darker than the library's 34.8%. Read from the o, stroke contrast splits the 46 measurable retro fonts this way: 14 have strong thick-and-thin contrast, 22 keep close to one stroke weight in every direction and 3 are heavier across than down, a reversed contrast. Effects drawn into the letters appear on 61 of the 98 retro fonts: inline on 12, varsity outline on 10, drop shadow on 9, 3D extrusion on 8, outline on 8, Tuscan spur on 5, stripe on 4, paint drip on 2, snow cap on 2 and pixel grid on 1.

Character sets run from 95 to 3,966 (Racer Slab), and outside Latin 19 fonts cover Hebrew, 13 cover Chinese, 9 cover Cyrillic, 8 cover Arabic and 7 cover Devanagari, Greek, Japanese kana, Korean Hangul and Thai. 96 of the 98 include accented Latin letters beyond A to Z; the other 2 stop at the basic alphabet, so check names with accents in the preview first. Kerning is built in for 84 of the 98: a median of 154 adjusted letter pairs, up to 10,920 in Magma Cipher Grotesk. 20 have OpenType ligatures or alternates, and 3 have tabular figures that line up in columns of prices or scores.