Fonts for your manga

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Using good font s for your manga is essential. Font will impact the integration of the text in your drawings, as well as give some personality to your characters and image your onomatopoeia. I will give here some indications on how you could use fonts, as well as some references to some free to use fonts.

Why is choosing a good font important for your manga?

The choice of the font you use for your text bubbles is key as it can impact the ease with which your readers will be able to read your content. A good font, with a good text segmentation, shall flow with your drawings and make the text fit in the scenes. On the contrary, if your font is difficult to decipher, your readers will be slowed down in their reading and get distracted from your story.

You must therefore choose a good base font for your text. And if you use some other fonts to add some specific voice effects like indicated in our article about text bubbles, choose them wisely.

But you could also use “bad” fonts on purpose. You could for instance choose a font difficult to decipher to have the reader sharing the difficulty your hero is having to understood another character. And with a bit of imagination you could surely find many other uses.

Selection of fonts for your manga

Base fonts

The Komika font family, is a set of free fonts for comics and manga. You will find more specifically the Komika Hand typeface which looks great, and the Komika Slim which allows for more text density. These are all caps (meaning all letters are capitalized and the same height) typefaces which means you can write your text normally and easily replace the font with another without having too update your texts.

Delius Unicase and Patrick Hand SC could also be some nice options. The main difference with Komika fonts is that Delius Unicase looks like an all caps font but differentiates some uppercase and lowercase characters, and Patrick Hands SC is a small caps font (meaning lowercase letters are smaller versions of the uppercase ones).

Fonts for written text

Fuzzy Bubbles offers a beautiful slick handwritten style that can be used for letters or notes, and Kalam is a quite similar alternative. Itim is a heavier typeface that can be used for text written with an ink pen, and Yatra One for text written with a marker.

Press Start 2P is well designed to write text on old computer screens.

Lacquer on its side is a good option for spray painted texts.

Fonts for sound effects

Rubik Glitch looks great as a font to illustrate crackling sounds, well reflecting the difficulty one can have to understand words in such a situation.

Rancher or Yikes can also be a great option for explosive onomatopoeias with its heavy rounded typeface.

The F-Rotten font on its side can be used to illustrate gory sounds.

RH-Shmatter can be used on its side to illustrate sound of things breaking or shattering.

The Times No Roman font also looks pretty cool and could be used for sounds like burning explosions for instance.

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I hope this article has been useful to you. I will keep it updated with great fonts I find.

Do not hesitate to share about your favorite fonts too!

Stef