Typography without defaults: 11 alternatives to Inter

AI assembles a website in minutes, and the result is often decent. The sites still look like copies of each other. Much of that is the typeface: text covers more of a page than images, buttons and icons put together, so the font colours the whole impression before anyone reads a word. The wrong one gives away a template faster than any other single choice.

Inter isn't the problem. Being the default is.

The typeface comes from the starter template. The Next.js documentation uses Geist in its examples, so does shadcn/ui's own docs site, and Inter has become the default for everything else. Both are well drawn: Inter carries over 2,000 glyphs and separate optical sizes for text and display. The problem is repetition. When one typeface turns up in tens of thousands of demos and templates, the eye reads it as a site assembled in a hurry.

See for yourself: eleven free alternatives

Free doesn't mean weak. Google Fonts carries variable families with optical sizes and properly drawn italics. For a Finnish company the natural start is Finlandica, Finland's national typeface, drawn by Helsinki Type Studio. Every face below is really loaded on this page, so you are seeing it as it would look on your own site.

This site sets headings and body in Host Grotesk. Instrument Serif italic was the same trick in lighter form, but it has turned up in so many AI-built headlines that it is now a tell of its own. That is what happens to defaults.

Swapping the typeface isn't enough on its own

A generic look comes just as much from text that is all one size, one weight and one column width. Butterick's practical typography boils these settings down to a handful of rules:

• Measure of 45–90 characters per line. Bringhurst's ideal for a single column is 66.
• Line spacing of 120–145 per cent of the type size, a little more for a serif than a sans.
• Body text at 15–25 pixels. Smaller is a default, not a decision.
• A large gap in size and weight between heading and body. Everything at 400 looks like a starter template.
• A variable font's opsz axis adjusts letterforms to the size they're set at. Browsers have supported it since 2020, and it is the cheapest way to make type look considered.
• Two families is plenty, as long as the second is clearly different: a serif against a sans, not two similar grotesques.

These habits now read as AI's fingerprint too: a tracked-out capitalised label above every heading, metadata strung together with middle dots, monospace for small figures, an arrow after every link. Individually each is harmless. Together they are the same phenomenon as the default typeface.

A paid typeface costs less than you'd think

Helsinki Type Studio is a Helsinki foundry founded in 2013, with typefaces drawn for HSL, the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the City of Oulu, S-Market and Tori.fi. Its web licence covers one site and is priced by monthly visitors: the Allee family up to 500,000 visitors costs €1,050, a single style starts at €70. The City of Helsinki licenses its signature face, Helsinki Grotesk Pro, at €70 per style. Distinctive typography is not reserved for large budgets.

Finland and its neighbours offer more choice than most expect: Typolar, Paavola Type Studio and Hurme Design, Sweden's Letters from Sweden, Iceland's Or Type and Norway's Monokrom. Among free Finnish faces, Jaapokki is an established headline choice.

Four things about licences

• Google Fonts may be used commercially, but download the files to your own server. Loading from Google's servers passes a visitor's IP address to Google, and the Munich regional court awarded damages over it in 2022.
• Free of charge isn't the same as free to use. Fontshare's Satoshi and Switzer may not be modified or handed to an outside designer, and the licence is terminable.
• With a paid typeface, what matters is who holds the licence. An agency's licence may not run a client's site, so have the licence issued in the client's name.
• Subscription typefaces stop working when the payments stop. Adobe Fonts and annual web licences are poor choices for a permanent brand face.

The technical side

In Next.js, next/font downloads the fonts at build time and serves them from your own domain, so no request reaches Google. From a variable font only the weight axis comes along by default, so optical size has to be requested explicitly. WordPress's bundled themes have served fonts from the theme directory since version 6.2. If a theme or page builder fetches a font from an external server, fix it.

How to choose

• Look at what your competitors use. If three in four are on Inter, you have a free chance to stand apart.
• Choose a family with an italic and enough weights. Without an italic, emphasis in body text looks clumsy.
• Prefer a variable font: you get every weight from one file.
• Test headings with the longest real text, not lorem ipsum. Finnish compound words break many layouts.
• Read the licence before installing a font on a client's site, and always self-host the files.

A typeface alone doesn't make a brand, but the wrong one tells a visitor about the template before the first sentence. The next part of the series covers colour, and why the violet gradient became AI's calling card.