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7 Ways to Design with Retro Serif Font (with Font Recommendations)

Nostalgic designs are making their way to the current era with contemporary twists. Retro serif fonts offer groove and old-school charms in modern design projects. Combining fun and quirkiness with subtle vintage elegance, these fonts open many possibilities in your design projects.

Looking for ideas to try in your next projects? Follow these seven design inspirations you can execute with retro serif, complete with recommended fonts.

1. Cricut Crafts (Home and Commercial)

The revolutionary Cricut cutting machines have opened the doors for amateur and professional crafters to create amazing projects. You can use retro fonts Cricut for various types of crafts, either as embellishments or the major parts of the designs.

Retro fonts offer endless artistic possibilities in your Cricut projects. You can make custom journal covers with embossed initials, monogram jewelry, t-shirt designs, stickers, creative greeting cards, and many more.

Recommended Fonts

  • The Aprila

The aprila offers a classy, elegant touch for greeting cards, journal covers, and monogrammed handmade jewelry. Its distinctive form creates fantastic shapes when used in a Cricut machine.

  • Bastro

Bastro has a distinguished slab style, with variations in glyphs and ligatures that you can use in any Cricut crafts.

  • Angel Club

Angel Club is bold and groovy, with pointed edges and curled ends that create a unique style. Another distinguished retro serif font for home and professional projects.

2. Retro Ad Illustrations

Why stop at the vintage fonts if you can use the artistic style, too? The artistic styles of retro advertisements have come back in modern design trends. You can use retro-inspired fonts to recreate this style in your design projects.

Retro ads have unique visual charms that make them popular among modern designers. They often have creative combinations of colors and graphics, either simple or explosive and colorful. The fonts are usually stylized and visually notable, with distinctive designs complementing the ad’s bold imagery.

Retro serif fonts are great for recreating vintage ads in your modern designs. Nowadays, you can find retro fonts with subtle modern influences, making it easier to bridge the visual gaps between the vintage and the contemporary.

Recommended Fonts

  • Magic Funk

Magic Funk is great to add some Funky Era-inspired touch to your retro designs. Its curled ends and bold strokes give great visual elements to any project.

  • Daisy

Daisy gives a fresh, beautiful touch to your retro ad-inspired designs. Its flowery glyphs are perfect for “vintage classy” design styles.

  • The Vindest

The Vindest adds a vibrant touch of the 80s to your ad-inspired designs. Use its unique ligatures and glyphs to add a zest to your designs.

3. Psychedelic Designs

Forget minimalism and everything muted; today’s design trends embrace the psychedelic. This design combines bold, clashing colors with wild, spiraling patterns. It also includes kaleidoscopic imagery and distortions of shapes and lines.

Fonts in the 70s are perfect for embracing psychedelic designs. Many are bold, bubbly, and even have exaggerated swashes and curls. This combination will create strong impressions, regardless of the design, material, and medium.

You can apply psychedelic designs to anything; the only limit is your imagination. From printed merchandise to brand identities and home crafts, the explosion of colors and shapes will make any design more interesting.

Recommended Fonts

  • Magic Retro

Magic Retro has a whimsical touch that is ideal for psychedelic designs. The stylish retro serif font has glyphs with ribbon-like swashes, adding magical charm to the texts.

  • Dream to Berich

Dream to Berich has a groovy look thanks to its bold, unique look. Its swashes and glyphs have exaggerated curls and loops, perfect for psychedelic designs.

  • Radnick

Radnick offers a stylish 70’s vibe from its bold, slightly irregular forms. Any psychedelic design ideas you have are boosted with exaggerated loopy swashes.

4. Mixing 2D and 3D

Mixing the 2D with 3D is a design idea that only gets boosted with every new trend. Mixing styles like this creates excitement from new depths, contrasts, and combinations. There are no limits in choosing the style of the design elements as long as they complement each other and describe your ideas well.

For example, you can combine 3D fonts unique with 2D images or place a sole object in the middle of a 2D environment. You can add different styles and effects, like pen scribbles or paper collages. Adding beautiful retro fonts can make the designs more interesting.

Recommended Fonts

  • Ailey Display

Combining rounded form with angled edges, Ailey Display adds a perfect artistic touch to your mixed media designs. You can use its alternates, glyphs, and ligatures to add a zest to your designs.

  • Holen Vintage

Groovy, funky Holen Vintage brings the charm of the 70s into your mixed media projects. It is a perfect font for a tropical vibe, similar to vintage holiday ad posters.

  • Shine Coasty

Shine Coasty bold, funky look makes it great for mixed media designs. You can use variations like different glyphs and alternates to create unique imagery.

5. Using Retro Fonts in Memphis Style

What’s a better way to use fun retro serif fonts than in Memphis style? Emerging during the ’80s, Memphis Style took the opposite side of the structured, subtle modern designs. It combines elements of kitsch, postmodernism, and pop art. The result is a mixture of shapes, colors, and patterns that look mismatched but lively.

Retro fonts, especially the ones inspired by the ’60s and ’70s, are the best for Memphis style. They have funky and groovy qualities, with vintage pop and psychedelic arts influences. Memphis style will add zest and spice to modern designs, especially with retro fonts.

How do you apply this design with retro fonts? You can apply the Memphis style elements in fashion items, cards, and wallpaper. You can also use the design style in digital projects, from illustrations to branding identities.

Recommended Fonts

  • Mahoda

Mahoda is a bold retro font with a subtle, playful touch, thanks to its rounded edges. The font comes with variations such as compact curled swashes and shadow effects, a perfect pair for Memphis-style designs.

  • Happy Monday

Happy Monday has a bold, straightforward design, with just the simplest details and smooth corners for the swashes. The straight form and rounded edges add some contemporary touch to the font, ideal for Memphis style that mirrors the 80’s.

  • The Beardy

The Beardy bold form and more artistic variations are perfect for the colorful kitsch of Memphis style. The beautiful wavy form and its many swash variations add weight to the entire kitsch concept of the Memphis.

6. Mysticism-influenced Designs

Mysticism has become a conversational trend online and offline, influencing designs. Visuals like horoscope-inspired images, sacred geometry, lotus, and all-seeing eyes become more popular. Retro fonts best paired with these designs usually have subtle elegance in their styles.

You can pair handwriting-style retro fonts with mystic images to design stickers, notebook covers, journals, and bags. You can tap into self-care businesses by creating labels, logos, and promotional posts.

Recommended Fonts

  • Losta Bonita

Inspired by natural handwriting, Losta Bonita brings some whimsy into your designs, just like its name. You also get different alternates, glyphs, and curled swashes that make the design even more magical.

  • Mercy Christole

Capture the air of mysticism properly in your designs with Mercy Christole. This retro serif font has a festive elegance in its design. The elongated swashes are curved and perfectly paired with the slightly narrow form of the font.

  • Letter Magic

Letter Magic offers a more elegant option for similar fonts that match your mysticism-related aesthetics. The font’s slightly concave tops and ribbon-like swashes that extend freely to every direction add the “carefree magic” touch to your designs.

7. Colorful, Whimsical Botanical Patterns

Many designs now incorporate botanical patterns that are drawn in whimsical ways. Often, the patterns resemble natural drawings that are reinterpreted using unique colors and shapes. This kind of design combines the natural and the colorfully exaggerated, a perfect balance for various designs.

Whimsical botanical patterns are perfect to be paired with serif fonts. Retro fonts match the relaxing yet vibrant air of these designs. You can use this combination to create designs such as product packaging (food, fragrances, skincare), journal or book covers, fashion items, and Cricut crafts.

Recommended Fonts

  • Regards

Regards has an elegant, fancy design that resembles vintage handwriting. However, the retro elements of this font design are perfect for more whimsical botanical drawings. The shape is smooth and has many alternative characters that create unique text.

  • Tangerine

Tangerine combines subtle playfulness, bold font, and slanted version. They are ideal for whimsical botanical patterns that combine natural and quirky elements.

  • City Mango

City Mango is a classy retro serif font with a touch of whimsy in its design. City Mango, a bold text with varying thickness and curved, rounded swashes, is paired perfectly with natural yet whimsical botanical patterns.

Retro serif fonts are great for creating designs with various methods and directions. These fonts are versatile enough for various projects, from mixed media to kitsch and modern trends. Start getting your inspiration from here to make your designs inspired by retro fonts.

Download Retro Serif Font Free for Personal use!

Get more more inspiration for Retro Serif Font via Pinterest : pinterest.com/burhanafif/retro-serif-font/

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