The free font Ultra is slightly more overweight as standard, but it makes a good alternative if you need to capture that stylised slab-serif look. Clarendon vs UltraĬlarendon comes in a variety of weights, but it’s commonly seen in its Black form to give it a solid presence. The normal weight does make a good match for the bold variants of the original Baskerville though. The normal weight is much thicker than the official Baskerville font, due to the reduction in contrast of Libre Baskerville to make it easier to read on screen. One free font that is based on Baskerville, as its name suggests, is Libre Baskerville. The classic Baskerville is one of the most popular serif typefaces with many spin offs. However, Merriweather Sans perfectly matches the humanist style of FF Meta with the subtle contrast in its strokes, as well as similarly shaped bowls. Some typefaces use one of each, and even if you find a font with the same style, there’s no guarantee that the bowl of the letter ‘a’ or the ear on the ‘g’ will be the same. It can be difficult to match the double or single story letters ‘a’ and ‘g’ in a font. It ticks all the boxes with it having the same slab-serif style, the double-story ‘g’ and it even mimics the letter ‘k’ almost exactly. FF Tisa vs BitterįF Tisa is a popular font with some lovely curved slab serifs which I thought would make it impossible to match with a free font, until I stumbled across Bitter. Not only does Roboto match up characters like the uppercase ‘R’, lowercase ‘j’ and straight tail on the letter ‘y’, it also comes in a range of styles which means you can use this font as an alternative to all the variants of FF DIN from light to black. Roboto is the best contender to the ever so popular FF DIN.

Thankfully most of those characters are lowercase and this style of typeface always looks much nicer in all caps! FF DIN vs Roboto Also being a pure geometric font means the letters that are made from basic shapes are almost identical, but Josefin does have some unusual characters that break the match. If you’re in need of a free alternative, look no further than Josefin Sans.

Futura vs Josefin Sansįutura is everyone’s favourite geometric typeface with those iconic sharp corners.

These fonts look great in uppercase with wide tracking. For those of use who aren’t lucky enough to have Proxima Nova (or the similarly cool Gotham font), Monterserrat is a beatiful pseudo geometric typeface with very similar characteristics. Since its release just 10 years ago Proxima Nova has pushed aside all the classics and claimed top spot in the best sellers lists.

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