As designers, we’re careful about choosing our fonts because it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. And, sometimes, it’s important that the message steps off the page or out of the screen to take on a life of its own. Selecting the best 3D font for your project is one way of achieving this.
Primarily, 3D fonts are there to make an impact. That’s one of the key criteria we’ve looked for when selecting the 12 that appear on this list. But we’ve gone further than the wow factor, and tried to find fonts that generate visual interest in other ways. Having three dimensions can give lettering weight, substance and tangibility – how do typographers utilise this? We’ll take a look.
Of course, any font can be given a 3D feel with something as basic as a drop shadow in InDesign. You can go further and extrude lettering with a 3D modelling application, or design your own 3D font. With the selection below, however, we’ve got the best readymade 3D fonts for you to use in print, online or even in motion graphics projects. Some the fonts on our list are free, and you can find free fonts here as well.
The best 3D fonts for your project
01. 3D Blocky
This hand drawn lettering by Luke William Turvey and Natsuko Hayashida of Okaycat comes with a slightly naïve feel to it, delivered in a font family with eight styles that include 3D Blocky, 3D Bippy, 3D Bricky and even 3D Blocky Neue. The variance is whether the character faces and/or the extruded sides of the letters are filled or not. There are several fonts like it, but 3D Blocky is by far and away the most popular, easy to use and affordable at $29.50 for the set.
02. Nexa Rust
Nexa Rust is a very popular choice for designers – perhaps because it offers a system of 83 fonts split into wide variety of categories including Slab, Sans, Script, Handmade and Extras. What binds them is not their proportions or metrics, but the distressed ‘rust’ look applied to many of the font faces. For our purposes, what’s of interest is the five different shadow versions available in each category which gives you ample flexibility in creating rusty headers that stand above the surrounding copy. It’s free to use in print, but you must credit the Fontfabric foundry if used online. Nexa Rust is included in Adobe Fonts.
03. Bungee
This rounded, easy-going, bulky font feels decadent in a way those snooty high-contrast serif typefaces never could be. Like other fonts listed here, its styles can be applied in layers to create 3D lettering as well as other effects. What’s unique about Bungee is that it was designed for vertical signage and you can easily imagine a neon inline illuminating each of its big, fat characters stacked above the doorway to a sleazy motel. Bungee is free and is included as a Google Font.
04. Town
Town is a versatile contemporary sans serif display font consisting of uppercase characters that fits perfectly into the worlds of branding, packaging, signage and advertising. The skeleton of the font actually has traditional industrial, geometric origins but these letters can be crafted for today’s design work by adding layers such as Shadow, Emboss or Black Lines (3D hatching). Mix up the styles applied within a word for an eclectic look. High-end bars and spirits brands seem to be a target market for Town, which costs $20 per style or $250 for the entire collection.
05. Detroit
Designed by Alex Sheldon of Match and Kerosene, Detroit enables you to combine various font layers to create 3D lettering in a variety of different ways. You can build up the characters using shading cast from different angles, such as Bottom and Right, and place these within the font’s outline. Colouring these layers within the Bevel version of the Detroit leads to some dazzlingly imaginative and unexpected effects that set it apart from other fonts in the 3D category.
06. Marbles
Sometimes the 3D effect can be achieved more subtly than literally extruding lettering and shading the sides of its three-dimensional forms, or stacking layers. Marbles is an experimental typeface – the result of a collaboration between F37 Foundry and Superfried – where the contrast between the thin and thick strokes of the oblong outlines that form each character are suggestive of light and shade but are entirely two dimensional. This is augmented when textures, such as marble, are used to fill the positive spaces within the letter forms, which lends a sense of substance and materiality. Brush in a little shading as you finish the artwork and the results can be astoundingly sophisticated.
07. Swish
As with Marbles, Swish doesn’t employ obvious devices to create a 3D effect. This is entirely optical, using the same techniques as MC Escher to trick our brains into perceiving seemingly impossible perspectives via the curves and angles of the flat forms in his imagery. Its Dutch designer, Leon Hulst, was inspired by European Brutalist architecture where angles, curves and varying thicknesses of forms change how we understand spaces in the built environment. Add some colour to the letter faces and you’ll have a lot of fun with Swish – just don’t stare at the W for too long…
08. Brim Narrow
Brim Narrow is a classy, traditional sans serif font inspired by a woodcut aesthetic. With 208 characters presented across eight layer styles, it enables you to create 3D lettering that goes deeper and deeper still, with a bit of optional hatching on the top layer for added personality. With Face, Outline, Half Extrude and Full Extrude (and outlines for both extrusions) there is plenty to explore, and adding colour can create a wild experience out of what is essentially quite formal lettering. Counter to this, it can also be used to create very subtle effects – a cover for a novel or book of poetry, perhaps. It’s free if you have Adobe Fonts.
09. Letter Craft
With some subtle shading, Letter Craft takes whimsical, modern calligraphic lettering and gives it a little added depth – it feels 3D but it doesn’t bash you over the head with mile-high extrusions that would ruin the spirit of the script. The shading is included in a vector file that comes with the font. With its ligatures and swooshes, Letter Craft is ideal for logos and bespoke lettering of all sorts and, yes, the shading does look a touch improbable but we like its unusual effect. It brings a captivating look to certain projects.
10. Metro Graffi
Well, it was inevitable, wasn’t it? We couldn’t make a list of the best 3D fonts without a nod to the street art aesthetic. Arguably, that’s the world where the very best 3D lettering is created. Metro Graffi includes basic and shadow layers to give a 3D effect to an old skool NYC-style set of letters and symbols. It’s tough, edgy, a bit masculine – but if that’s not your can of aerosol then check out Cikareotype’s more playful urban 3D fonts.
11. Color Tubes
When you near the end of a list like this one, a couple of weird, left-field entries are entirely acceptable. Color Tubes is a 49-character typeface made up of high-resolution colour bitmaps in the Open Type SVG format. Each letter consists of hundreds of cylinders in a range of pinky-purply-beigy pastel colours and while it’s true that this font’s application will be limited, it just looks cool. So, it made the list.
12. Wubble 2.0
Typography so old school you hardly ever see fonts with version numbers, but that’s not why we love Wubble 2.0. The 3D lettering here gets away from the grade-school bubble font look for something stranger, shinier and more dynamic. Its liquid silver style effect, with full-on highlights and reflections, is totally captivating and comes in three forms – Glossy Chrome, Rough Gold and Holographic. Similar variants include Alien Skin and Happy OK, but Wubble 2.0 has the perfect feel in this category.
For more great fonts, see our best script fonts and best typewriter fonts roundups.
