7 font trends for 2025: from optical sizing to inflatable 3D fonts

Typography isn’t just about good-looking letters – it’s the cornerstone of visual communication, influencing how people perceive brands, navigate content and engage with design. As 2025 approaches, font trends are set to evolve in exciting ways, offering fresh opportunities for designers, creatives, and content creators to take their work to the next level. Whether you’re exploring Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, or independent foundries – or even designing a typeface of your own – our trend predictions will help you make the perfect pick. 

From the resurgence of retro-inspired typefaces to the versatility of multi-variable fonts, we provide practical insights and inspiration to keep your designs relevant and captivating. So, whether you’re crafting a new brand identity or aiming to improve the user experience, we’re here to help fuel your creativity. Because we know execution is everything, we suggest resources to integrate these trends seamlessly into your projects. 

Dive in and discover how the future of fonts can elevate your visual storytelling!

Sans serifs might have dominated the digital world over the past decade (we see you, Google), but we predict a return to serifs, which add authority and a side of old-school sophistication.

Nostalgia plays a vital role in this revival, and because serifs evoke heritage, craftsmanship, and credibility, they are perfect for brands looking to convey trust, authenticity, or a vintage aesthetic. Just think of the timeless elegance of the Vogue magazine logo, with its modified Didot typeface. It’s unmistakably stylish and happily rubs shoulders with the sans-serif cover lines, demonstrating the versatility of serifs. Serifs enhance readability, crucial for long-form content, by gently guiding the eye along each line. 

Remember, this trend is more than Times New Roman and friends. This resurgence is an opportunity to experiment with modern serifs that seamlessly blend tradition with contemporary cool. Got a magazine in mind? Designing a content-rich website? Look at our curated collection of royalty-free serif fonts for elegant headlines, professional paragraphs, or a modern twist on a classic font family. Find examples of implementing this font trend in our ultimate serif guide. 

Eyes on the prize? Eyes on the size, more like. That’s because, regarding legibility, not all fonts are created equal. For example, when a font appears on your TV or at the cinema, it needs bolder lines and finer details so the message is seen loud and clear. But if that same font appears on a phone screen, it requires wider tracking and larger apertures to ensure it’s easier on the eye.

While it was once common practice to design a font at one optimum size and hope it worked well – or acceptably – at all sizes, single-size (or single-master) type designs ignore these nuances. However, with this trend, fonts are customized to suit specific size ranges – so they’re easy to read wherever they appear. In other words, with optical sizing, fonts can seamlessly transition from large headlines to small body text while always maintaining readability.

Optical sizing might have originated in traditional print, where typefaces were adjusted for different sizes to keep them sharp and legible, but the same is true for a digital environment. So it’s no wonder this trend is gaining traction – especially among creatives looking for the best fonts for website design. 

For example, Google’s highly versatile variable font – Roboto Flex – includes an optical size axis. This allows for seamless scaling from tiny text in user interfaces to large display sizes, ensuring easy-to-read visual harmony across different platforms.

Bitmap and low-res distressed fonts are making waves by tapping into the raw energy of early digital days. Forget sleek, flawless letters—these typefaces embrace pixelation, glitches, and imperfections for a retro-futuristic vibe that feels nostalgic and daringly modern.

Remember early computer screens and 8-bit video games? Bitmap fonts, built from grids of pixels, bring that same charming lo-fi aesthetic. But these aren’t just dusty relics – designers breathe fresh life into them, blending their gritty texture with contemporary layouts and color palettes. 

We expect to see distressed fonts, with their deliberate glitches and distortions, inject a rebellious edge into headlines, posters, and album art. They’re versatile enough to bring personality to branding, punch to editorial design, or a throwback vibe to digital projects. Think of designer Agathe Millet’s 8-bit retro-style font Hardanger, inspired by Norwegian embroidery and neatly ties together digital and physical crafts in a delightfully unexpected way.

In a world obsessed with high-res perfection, celebrate the beauty of imperfection and pixelate your words with our collection of bitmap fonts – from serif to san-serif and script styles.

Ready to smash things up – but always with a wink and a smile – this trend takes the raw, unapologetic energy of brutalism and injects it with a dose of fun. Think raw, heavy, unconventional letterforms softened with rounded edges, quirky ligatures, and unexpected flourishes. 

Combining architectural forms with an approachable edge, these typefaces are perfect for brands that want to exude confidence while still being friendly and engaging. From eye-catching logos and packaging to posters and digital designs, playful brutalist fonts add a unique personality that’s impossible to ignore.

For example, during its recent brand refresh, the world-famous Conran Design Group embraced the trend with the help of Le Monde-type designer Jean François Porchez. Just look at the chunky, almost-closed ‘C’ that cleverly hides a ‘D’ inside as a bold nod to the company’s design-driven ethos. The company has a versatile typeface from this single letterform that balances brutalist weight with playful creativity.

With our collection of brutalist fonts, get ready to be bold and break the rules while never compromising on approachability. With our Trend Watch feature, you can discover neo-brutalist fonts for your designs. 

Found the right font? Time to flex it. Multi-variable typefaces are here to give designers supercharged creative control and flexibility like never before. These fonts are like the Swiss Army knives of typography, allowing you to adjust weight, width, slant, and optical size on the fly. No more being boxed in by rigid font families – with multi-variable fonts, you get endless variations in a single file.

Need a bold, wide headline and a slender, italicized caption? No problem. These fonts adapt dynamically, whether you’re designing for a massive billboard, a responsive website, or a tiny smartwatch. They can even respond to user interactions, creating an engaging and fluid typographic experience.

Brands love the efficiency, too. By consolidating multiple styles into one file, multi-variable fonts reduce load times and boost performance. Take Netflix Sans – the streaming platform’s custom variable font was designed in collaboration with London-based typeface design studio Dalton Maag. It seamlessly adapts to different screen sizes and resolutions, ensuring optimal legibility and a consistent brand experience across devices, no matter where you’re binge-watching a boxset.

Plus, Spotify hits all the right notes using multi-variable typefaces. Their custom font – Spotify Circular – adapts dynamically across various platforms, from mobile apps to desktop dashboards, ensuring everything stays crisp, clear, and consistent, whether you’re browsing small song titles or big podcast headers. 

If you want to improve your skills and learn how to make a font subtly bolder or more italicized (rather than simply adjusting a slider in Illustrator), our Envato tuts+ tutorial on variable fonts is here to help. 

It’s up and away with a font trend that will ‘float’ your work to the next level. That’s because, in 2025, 3D ‘inflatable’ fonts are set to add a fun, buoyant energy to design, bringing a soft, balloon-like vibe. 

Imagine letters that look like they’ve just floated out of a bouncy castle – plump, shiny, and full of personality. This ready-to-burst example from Kilala, the leading colored contact lens brand in China, perfectly conveys the cushiony-softness of its Double Comfort Collection with sheeny-shiny balloon letters. (We don’t want to burst our bubble, but there are more balloon fonts next.) 

These fonts are all about playful dimensionality, moving beyond flat type to embrace a 3D aesthetic with rounded edges and pillowy shadows. As a result, they practically pop off the page. Drawing inspiration from Y2K (think inflatable chairs and bubblegum-pink gadgets), these fonts sprinkle in just the right amount of nostalgia. But this isn’t a copy-paste trip down memory lane – designers are remixing retrofuturism with a modern twist, making these fonts feel fresh and definitely not dated.

Surprisingly versatile, inflatable fonts are perfect for creating an attention-grabbing aesthetic. Thanks to advances in 3D design tools and rendering software, these bubbly letters are also easier to create and customize.

If you’re interested in making 3D text effects in Photoshop, check out our step-by-step tutorial, and blow up your next project with our collection of 3D fonts.

Bubble fonts are back, and they’re ready to bring a dose of joy and nostalgia to your designs in 2025! These plump, rounded letterforms are bursting with personality, evoking the carefree fun of childhood. Think comic books, scribbled-on pencil cases, and 90s cartoons – all wrapped up in one delightful, bouncy package.

Like Puffy Pop from Envato Elements, which would look at home on a cereal packet from your childhood, you guessed it – nostalgia is the secret ingredient here. Bubble fonts capture the spirit of the 90s and early 2000s, tapping into a collective memory of more straightforward, more playful times. But don’t mistake them for kids’ stuff! Today’s bubble fonts come with a modern twist: bold textures, smooth curves, soft shapes, and fun animations.

Their superpower? Approachability. Bubble fonts are friendly, warm, and instantly welcoming, perfect for brands that want to radiate joy and lightheartedness. That said, you can create something that packs a premium punch by simply playing around with the color palette – like this Iridescent Chrome Text Effect add-on layer.

Use bubble fonts for packaging that pops, headlines that bounce off the page, or social media graphics that rise above the noise. Whether you’re going for playful, retro, or just want to add a little whimsy, our guide to these bubbly beauties chart their origins and modern-day applications. 

Speaking of animated fonts, why not explore the Cavalry motion graphics? This rising app will take your typefaces to the next level!

Staying ahead of font trends keeps your work fresh, engaging, and full of personality. From playful brutalism and bubbly type to multi-variable fonts and gritty bitmap styles, these typography trends will set the tone in the year ahead.

Dive into Envato’s vast collection of fonts, templates, and design resources to bring these styles to life in your projects. Need more inspiration? Check out our guides on Web Design Trends, Graphic Design Trends, and 3D Design Trends, and create boldly!