
If you are looking for a classic, elegant style, Old Standard TT is your font. The numbers are well designed and fit nicely into that style. It’s a wildly used serif font and it ships with lining and tabular figures. Next, for the Garamond-style serif fonts, Crimson Text is the way to go. Semibold and bold are slightly shrunk in font size here, otherwise they would be too long.
Number fonts pro#
If you happened to use PT Sans or Source Sans Pro, PT Serif and Source Serif Pro are two other generic serif fonts with good number design. It doesn’t add too much flare to your project, but it’s universal and it’s extremely easy to read on any screen. A typical, good, contemporary serif font with well designed numbers. There are a number of different styles of serif fonts in general, and we tried to pick the best from each style. We start the recommendations with serif fonts. With these three principles in mind, we went through the entire Google Font library and picked the five best number fonts in each category. Those are special cases, and those fonts are probably not made to be number fonts, but they are good examples to emphasize the importance of checking each individual digit. Similarly, here are some examples of confusing and weirdly designed figures: Lastly, before settling on a font, it’s good to double check on all its individual figure design - make sure the number one doesn’t look like seven, five doesn’t look like six, etc.

If your data set requires other symbols, it’s a good idea to include them as well. We always make sure to check “%” and “$,” so we use “$123,456,789.00%” as the testing string. Some examples of “$” and “%” symbols that might surprise you if you don’t check ahead:
Number fonts free#
With free fonts, it’s sometimes unpredictable how good those symbols are. The second step is to check that any given number font has good number symbols.

Though it’s not necessary for all use cases, it’s nice to use tabular numbers as a default. Tabular figures offer better vertical alignment than proportional ones.

Tabular just means the numbers are monospaced - every number occupies the same horizontal space, instead of varying space according to their own shape (which is called “proportional” in typography terms). Top: Libre Baskerville Bottom: Merriweather

The first rule for picking a good number font is to make sure it comes with lining and tabular figures.įancy typography terms aside, lining just means that all the numbers are sitting on the baseline and aligned with the cap height, instead of going up and down (which is called “oldstyle”). Though we use Helvetica for most of our embeddable data visualizations, we do have several guidelines for picking number fonts and we are happy to share them with the world. Our PrinciplesĪt Graphiq, we think about data tables, charts, and infographics all day every day. If you can’t afford FF DIN or Numbers by H&CO, there isn’t much guidance, let alone a go-to recommendation list. Though there are countless blog posts and recommendation lists for fonts and font pairings these days, when you look for best fonts for numbers, it’s not as easy to find. Including a Recommendation List for 20 Google Fonts AugFinding the Best Free Fonts for Numbers
