Contrary to popular belief, condensed and narrow fonts don’t make your text cramped or crowded. You just have to know the appropriate time and place to use the font. Condensed fonts are widely used these days for headlines and portraying bold messages, and when deployed in the right place, they can give stunning impact!
It takes a lot of testing and experimenting to find the perfect font for a design. This process can be costly at times. The good news is you can download all the fonts in this list for a single price when you subscribe for Envato Elements. It’s only $19 per month, and gives you access to hundreds of beautiful typefaces.
What is a Condensed or Narrow Font?
The letters of a condensed font have narrow widths, compared to similar typefaces in the same family. It’s also about the relative height and width of a font. If it’s much taller than it is wide, then it’s likely to fall into the bracket of a “condensed” typeface.
They’re not suitable for use everywhere (and they can be particularly difficult to read if you’re using them for body copy, or large paragraphs of text). But, used for headlines, quotes, logos, and places where you want your text to stand out, narrow fonts can be a great choice.
Here are some examples of, in our opinion, the best condensed and narrow fonts to get you started!
Lonssa Condensed Typeface
Lonssa is a gorgeous condensed font that comes with a stylishly narrow design. It’s perfect for feminine product design as well as your lifestyle blog headers, book covers, greeting cards, wedding invitations, and more.
Maxwell Sans UltraLight
Maxwell is a minimalist narrow font that features a mixed modern-retro design inspired by the text and sign designs from the 1950s. This font comes in both uppercase and lowercase letter versions with alternative characters and glyphs.
Glorynight Tall Version
This is font will fit in nicely with all of your website header designs, logotypes, badges, and signage designs. The tall and bold design of the font will certainly make your text stand out. It has been designed with “the principle of octagonal form”
Vera Typeface
A font made specifically for luxury brands and high-end products, Vera is ideal for showing off authority and class. Vera features a design similar to the font used by Vogue and it comes in rough, regular, and oblique versions.
Checkpoint Display Font
Checkpoint is a professional multilingual font you can use with almost any type of design work, including logos, signage, banners, posters, and much more. The font also comes in several different versions ranging from light to bold.
Latinbrush Typeface Family
This highly creative brush font also features a narrow condensed design. It supports multiple languages and comes in several font variations. It’s great to use with your greeting card designs, social media posts, and poster designs.
Hammerhead Typeface
Hammerhead is a big, bold, and condensed font that you can use for vintage and retro-themed designs, including logotypes, signage, website headers, banners, and posters. The font includes both uppercase and lowercase letters and comes with 252 glyphs.
Curvos Font + Bonus Badge
Curvos is a stunningly designed condensed font that features a pop art-themed design. This font is perfect for badge designs, logotypes, website headers, social media posts, and more. In fact, the font comes bundled with 6 unique badge designs as well.
Highest Praise Font
A brush font featuring a stylish condensed design. This font features a mix of both modern and vintage design elements that will add a unique attractiveness to your various design works.
Trailmade Font Family
A yet another brush that comes with a truly natural look and a rugged design. The font is available in several different styles and it includes swashes, automatic double-letter ligatures, and more handcrafted design elements.
Minty March Condensed Font
This is the type of font that you usually see on greeting cards and wedding invitations. Minty March is a condensed font that also doubles as a serif font. It includes both uppercase and lowercase letters with numbers, ligatures, and more.
Selecta
Selecta is a rounded sans serif condensed font that’s perfect for poster and website header designs. The font also features a professional design that makes it suitable for logotypes and branding work as well.
Montagna LTD
This unique font features a design inspired by the details seen in the Italy’s Stile Liberty. It’s been designed as a “tribute to Italy of the early twentieth century,” which makes it the perfect font to be used with your vintage and classic themed designs.
Tinsel Font Family
Tinsel is a family of fonts that features several condensed typefaces. You can use the font for branding work like letterheads, logotypes, business cards, and other professional designs.
Minority Condensed Script Font
This font features an ultra-condensed script design that aims to give your text a natural hand-painted look. It will go along great with T-Shirt designs, logos, and other creative design work.
Cheddar Gothic Font Family
This beautiful and hand-drawn condensed font family includes 8 unique typefaces, including Sans, Serif, Slab, Stencil, and more. Each font in this family comes with 92 matching catchword and icon glyphs, which makes this the perfect font for designing logos and signage.
Blocklyn Font Family
Blocklyn is a great font for showing your titles and mission statements in big bold text. The font family features 4 typefaces Condensed, Condensed Italic, Grunge, and Grunge Italic. It also comes with 2 bonus PSD mockup templates as well.
Maxwell Sans Small Caps Bold
Inspired by retro fonts from the 1950’s, the Maxwell Sans font features two typefaces: Regular and small caps. The clean and minimal design of this font makes it best for both headline and body text.
Forest Line Font Condensed
This condensed web font comes with a creative touch and unique design. The font is available in three versions: light, regular, and bold. It seems ideal for website headers, titles, and even logo designs.
BiteChalk Typeface
BiteChalk font will make your text look as if they were drawn on a blackboard. This font comes in 4 typefaces, including regular, bold, normal, and slim. It’s a unique font you can use for designing restaurant menu boards, signage, posters, T-Shirt designs, and much more.
Carnot All-Caps Font
This all-caps grotesque type font features a minimal and an elegant design for making your logotypes, magazine, and poster design look more professional than ever. Carnot font also supports over 20 different languages.
Essenziale – Font Family
Essenziale is a minimalist and an ultra-condensed font family that comes in 8 versions, including Bold, Slab, Slab Bold weights, and more. Each font in this family features unique characters, making a total of 412 glyphs in the font family.
Global
This is a professional condensed serif typeface that’ll make your text looks like something you usually see on modern magazines and corporate websites. The Global font is perfect for your formal and commercial designs.
BAHN Pro Rough
Bahn is a rough font that’ll go along nicely with your entertainment and playful designs. This condensed and vintage-style font comes in 3 weights and 228 glyphs.
Kahuripan
At first sight, you can see this font being used for a logo, signage, or a header design. The bold retro design of the font makes it perfect for such designs. The font comes in both uppercase and lowercase versions.
Mangano
Mangano features both a clean and rough worn off design with a mixed modern/vintage look. It comes in uppercase and lowercase versions for creating signage, logos, T-Shirt designs, and more.
Berry Typeface
This slightly rounded multilingual sans-serif typeface supports spanish, portuguese, german, danish, french, and a number of other languages. The modern look of this typeface makes it ideal for any type of design work.
Gatsunaga
Gatsunaga is a condensed brush font that features a design inspired by a samurai sword strikes. Hence the sharp edges and precise flow of the font design. It looks perfect for book covers and movie posters.
Nedo
Nedo is a display font that features both normal and condensed versions. The retro look of this typeface makes it the best choice for neon signs, T-Shirt designs, and logo designs.
Hennigar
The designer of this font has put a serious thought into crafting each letter in this Neo-Grotesque sans typeface in precision. The font comes in both normal and condensed versions.
Timber Typeface
This font looks great for crafting social media content and website headers. The Timber typeface features an old vintage look along with grunge elements.
Amorie SC Font Family
Amorie is a hand-drawn font that comes in a number of weight, styles, and glyphs. This font will help add a little human touch to your digital graphic designs.
Wilder
This is yet another handwritten condensed sans serif font that includes 300+ glyphs and comes in .otf, .ttf, and web font versions. It’ll look great with your header and poster designs.
Muller Narrow Font Family
Muller font not only features an elegant modern design, but it also comes with a massive collection of 20 different weights. The font has been designed to be used as both a header and body text font. Web font formats are also included in this font family.
Hipstetic Font Family
Hipstetic is a font family that features a mixed design of hipster and vintage looks. It comes in 4 different font variants and 100 glyphs. Perfect for book covers, website headers, signage, and more.
Aracne Condensed
Aracne is a handwritten font that features slightly scrawled letterforms with a natural look. It also comes in regular, condensed and ultra condensed styles to fit in with different types of design work.
Catalina Anacapa
This hand-drawn font pack comes in 5 font families and with 2 graphic ornament fonts, each with its own different styles and weights. This font pack has everything you need for crafting restaurant menus, quotes, signage, logos, headers, and much more.
Once you’ve found the best condensed font for your titles, then comes the challenge of finding a matching font for body text. Keep exploring Envato Elements to find the right font combination for your design projects. And have a look at our modern serif fonts and script fonts selections for more inspiration.
