10 Whimsical fonts best for branding & artsy designs
This font collection looks at whimsical typefaces best for branding, children’s projects, and artsy designs.
This font collection looks at whimsical typefaces best for branding, children’s projects, and artsy designs. Each font listed features an image with a type sample and a quick overview of all the main glyphs. The snippet below the image explains how to use it to create an eccentric, playful, or whimsy look.
Whimsical fonts for artsy children’s projects
Vole is an easy-to-read sans-serif font that works well for headlines and shorter body copy. For kids’ projects, you can use an all-uppercase or all-lowercase text setting to add a considered professional look. Vole has a softer texture because of its filled-in brackets, the area where two letter strokes meet.
Pout is a reverse-contrast typeface—it’s not often seen and looks whimsical to our eyes because of its upside-down stroke thickness. In reverse fonts, the boldness is on the horizontal axis, most commonly on both the top and bottom but sometimes only on one side. In type history, you can also find this style named “Italienne.” (Source: Schriften-Atlas, Petzendorfer).
Pout is a sans serif, modern version, perfect for Cricut designs because it has no extraneous vector points.
Rail is a minimal decoration font, a sans-serif emphasizing pulling strings, binding things together, and making connections. It works well for logo and headline design. The bolder you go in style, the more whimsical it looks, whereas if you pick a lighter font weight, the contrast retracts, making this a more standard design that’s better to use for setting text.
Bool is a quality font family of nine weights. This typeface is versatile; it has pointy tips (e.g., M and W), which makes it playful. Bool is whimsical because of its alternative letters. If you’re using a design program like Illustrator, InDesign, or Figma, you can access these via the glyphs panel or by double-clicking the letter you want to swap. For getting an overview of the design options, check out Bool’s product page.
Fancy, high-quality type
Kijs Black is a typeface communicating a natural, plant-like character. It’s amorphic at times; ball terminals fill open spaces, terminals grow like cuttings attached to their mother’s stem, and some letters are cursive—as if the light source is pulling them in a different direction. The Black weight is lush and soft in character.
Kijs Thin is the lightest version of Kijs mentioned above. It’s so thin that it looks fragile, but when given tight letter spacing, it gains a more compact feel with a calligraphic quality. This delicate style is artsy, modern, and luxurious while being whimsical at its core.
Curly and rounded fonts
Skay is a must-have for every font collection. It’s a minimal, round bubble font with fluidity through a writing axis that differs slightly between letters. Skay can be light or bold, making it a versatile headline and logo typeface with handwriting and soft-brush quality.
Also in the handwriting category is Lace, here shown in a lighter font weight that is curly, feminine, and friendly. It’s an excellent fit for younger-audience projects and can be used in Cricut applications.
How to think about using whimsical fonts from a designer’s perspective
Typfaces that communicate a particular character, like “whimsical,” “playful,” or “fantasy,” are best when used as display text. Display type includes headlines, logos, and shorter text snippets. This type of text contrasts body text, which must be easy to read and look more conform on a page to communicate professionalism. Of course, you can go wild when it comes to personal graphics for invitations or let’s say gaming profiles.
The stronger and edgier display fonts are in their design style, the more considerate designers are when using them. An easy way to add the right amount of “magic” to graphics is by pairing the more eccentric type with a calmer, more standard-looking typeface. To do that, define the display character and find the same concept within a text font.
For example, from the list above, curly fonts like Lace Rounded are super playful. They make great, memorable headlines in light or medium weights and friendly logos in bolder weights. For logo taglines or text snippets of two lines or longer, pair Lace with Bool Light, Regular, or SemiBold. Bool is an excellent text font, especially in its mid-ranged font weights.
Another text font option not on this list is Acme—it’s a modern, friendly typeface because the terminals, e.g., in letters c and e, end in an upward stroke, allowing this typeface to literally smile.
