Whether you’re working on a sign design for a coffee shop or a luxury boutique, choosing the right font for your sign will go a long way to make your signage look more professional and unique.
When designing different types of signs, you are often forced to work with specific standards and font layouts. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative and use unique fonts in your designs.
Finding a great font usually means spending hours scouring the web and getting disappointing results. To help you save time and find a creative and stylish font more quickly, we handpicked the best fonts for signs (for all kinds of businesses and shops), as well as a few helpful tips for designing signs!
Top Pick 
Designing trendy signage for urban shops and stores will get so much easier when you have this font in your arsenal. It features a trendy and clean design, making it appropriate for all kinds of brands from small businesses to luxury shops.
The font comes in 4 different font styles, including regular, outline, italic, and sans serif. It’s also an all-caps font.
Why This Is A Top Pick
The classic clean look of this font is what makes it stand out. The font is perfect for designing titles for signs that show off professionalism. The multilingual support is also an added bonus.
Sabang is the perfect example of a clean and narrow title font. Its tall letter design makes it a great choice for designing signage of all kinds. It also comes in two styles featuring clean and rough designs. The font includes both uppercase and lowercase letters as well.
At first glance, you can see this is a great font for designing signs for luxury brands and high-end businesses. The font features a modern design inspired by art-deco styles from the 20th century. It comes in 8 different font weights featuring alternates and obliques.
Check out Ambattur, a calligraphy-style modern signature font that will look stunning on business cards, posters, invitations, and other branding materials. It comes with tons of glyphs, alternates and ligatures, and much more.
Next up, we have Sign Marker, a brush pen style signature font that you’ll be hard-pressed to not consider. It comes bundled with a full set of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, and multilingual support.
If you are looking for a signage font that really stands out, take a leap of faith in Beagle Sign, a stylish and unique typeface that will pay for itself many times over. Try it out for your next branding project!
Wanting to get your hands on a luxurious-looking signage font without having to spend a penny? Look no further than Orlando, a script typeface featuring large dramatic capitals, and a wide range of alternates and ligatures to help you completely customize your work to your liking.
Perfect for a variety of design projects, Ranormal is a stunning font choice that is available as a free download for both personal and commercial use. It’s one of the best fonts for signs, so hurry up; get your hands on it now!
If you’re working on a sign design for a casual or hipster brand, this font is perfect for you. It features a modern-vintage design that comes with a monoline layout. It includes uppercase and lowercase letters as well as glyphs for crafting unique signage of all kinds.
This is a unique font that comes with a design inspired by Japanese culture. It includes a handmade lettering design that’ll fit in well with casual and modern sign designs. It’s most suitable for designs related to creative brands and agencies.
Manufaktur is a bold typeface that comes in 5 different font weights, 3 font styles, and 3 widths. It features a design inspired by the Swedish industrial machine. The font is perfect for designing signage related to corporate businesses and industries as well as modern brands.
Nevrada is an elegant and free font you can use to design signage for luxury and high-end brands. This font features a stylish design that makes it especially suitable for fashion and design brands.
Gamine is another free font featuring a luxury design. This font is perfect for all kinds of modern signage design. The best part is you can use the font for free with commercial projects.
If you’re working on a signage design for a modern business or a luxury brand, this font will help you make a minimal and attractive sign with a clean design. It comes in 5 different font weights ranging from extra light to extra bold. The font comes with a web font version as well.
Featuring a mix of modern and vintage looks, Gatsby is a stylishly minimalist font you can use to design unique signage for luxury and apparel brands. The font comes in 4 different styles, including normal, outline, retro, and distorted.
Boomerang is a fun and creative font with an attractive design. It includes both uppercase and lowercase letters featuring handbrush style character design. The font also comes with ligatures, alternates, and multilingual support as well.
This is a creative and stylish font you can use to design signs for modern businesses and unique stores, especially including sports and fashion related brands. The font comes with lots of OpenType features as well.
Frank is a big bold font that comes in 5 font weights and 4 styles, making it a total of 20 typefaces. It includes several different choices for you to make an attractive sign for all kinds of modern businesses and stores.
Gallagher is a vintage font that can be used to make retro-style signage and badges. The font features all-caps letters and you can use it for free with personal projects.
Valenciaga features a bold and unique design. It’s ideal for sign designs related to modern casual and hipster brands. The font is free to use with personal projects.
Designing a sign for an automotive company, vehicle dealer, or a garage? Then grab this stylish font to design a vintage-themed sign that’ll surely attract attention. It comes in various styles along with a bonus back of vector elements and backgrounds.
Bahn is a modern font with a rugged design. It includes 3 different font styles and 228 glyphs. The bold narrow font makes it a great choice for signage, especially for designing signs for men’s apparel and fashion brands.
Durbank is yet another rugged font that comes with an old-school industrial-themed design. It’s an all-caps font that’s most suitable for making signage for vintage apparel brands and businesses.
Regius is a creative display font featuring a unique design of its own. The font design is inspired by the typefaces used in old English pub signs. It’s great for designing signs for restaurants, pubs, and much more.
Krisha is a display font with big bold lettering. It’s a great choice for making sings and billboards. Especially for making them clearly visible from afar. The font is completely free to use with commercial projects as well.
Zeky is a modern font that comes with an elegant design made specifically for crafting signage for luxury brands, fashion boutiques, and lifestyle shops. The font features a classic character set.
Adelia is a modern and creative font you can use to design both logos and signage for many different types of businesses, including fresh foods, restaurants, juice bars, and more.
This vintage display font can be used to design signs for pubs, restaurants, and more. It comes with lots of stylistic alternate characters, ligatures, and support for both uppercase and lowercase letters.
Garde is a modern logo and signage font featuring a unique outline design. The creative design style of this font makes it a great choice for crafting signs for luxury and lifestyle businesses.
Author Type is a creative brush font that comes with uppercase and lowercase letters as well as swashes and punctuations. The font is most suitable for making signage for creative brands, agencies, and even startups.
Riverside font comes in two different versions—monoline and sans. It features a classic vintage design which will look great on pub, automotive, adventure, sports, and outdoor themed business and store signs.
This is the perfect font you can use to design signage for an alcohol business. It also looks ideal for making signs for pubs, restaurants, and more as well.
Indigo is a modern font that comes with an attractive chunky design. The font is available in 2 versions—regular and outline. The combination of the typefaces will allow you to create unique signage for modern lifestyles and fashion businesses.
This minimal monolinear font lets you choose from 5 different font weights to design creative signs for beauty, fashion, and luxury product stores. The elegantly rounded design of the font will surely add a unique touch to your signage designs.
Luxe is a bold poster style font featuring thick serifs. It’s perfect for making eye-catching signs for luxury businesses and jewelry stores. The font is available in OpenType and TrueType versions.
Modeka is a minimalist and modern font you can use to design signage for creative brands and businesses. It’s available in bold and regular font weights, which you can combine to create stylish sign designs.
Gope is a modern font with a luxury design that’s most suitable for making logos and signage for high-end businesses and stores. The font will especially look great in luxury fashion and jewelry store signs.
Design urban-style signage for modern businesses and brands using this creative font. It comes with a stencil design featuring a rough textured look. The font features all-caps letters and it’s available in 2 different versions as well.
Aspal is an elegant font that features a high-end premium design. The font comes in both regular and stencil style typefaces, allowing you to create unique signage and logos for luxury brands and businesses.
5 Tips for Designing Signs
There are many different types of signs ranging from shop signs to billboards, display signs, promotional signs, and more. Whichever sign you’re designing, these tips will help you make it more effective and professional.
1. Aim for Better Readability
Your main goal in designing any signage is to make it easily readable. Especially to make it readable from a distance. After all, what’s the purpose of a sign that’s hard to read.
The key to making a sign with better readability is using the right font. There are occasions where you can use stylish script fonts in signage. But in general, using a clean sans-serif font with a bold font weight is the best approach to designing a great sign.
2. Leverage Psychology of Color
The colors you choose for the sign have a much bigger effect than you’d think. According to the psychology of color, specific colors can evoke emotions and even influence human reactions.
For example, have you ever wondered why most “For Sale” signs are designed using the color Red? That’s because Red is a color that attracts attention. It simply makes you stop and look no matter where you are.
Make sure the colors you pick for your sign design fits its purpose.
3. The Size Matters
When it comes to design, the size always matters. Think about how and where your sign is printed and used. Is it being printed in large billboard size or is it a small shop sign?
Depending on the size and location of the sign, you’ll have to pick appropriate colors, fonts, and font sizes for the sign. For example, if the sign is to be used outdoors, you may have to use large font sizes and pick colors that stand out in natural lighting conditions.
4. Stick With a Minimal Design
Usually, the best approach to designing an effective sign is to use a minimal and clutter-free design. Just use either a light or dark color background and let it highlight your sign title and text.
It may not work for all signs, but it gets the job done for most types of signs. So when in doubt, go for a minimal design.
5. Follow the Trends
Depending on the type of sign you’re making, you can also find inspiration in current trends to make it stand out from the crowd. For example, one of the most popular trends in shop signs is using retro and vintage badge-style designs.
Trends are popular for a reason, so why not use them to your advantage.
For more amazing fonts inspiration, check out our best big poster fonts collection.
Font Collections
This is our series of beautiful, inspiring collections of fonts and typefaces. These articles feature bold poster fonts, decorative scripts, and everything in-between! Find the perfect font for your next design project with one of these collections.
