Are you looking for a more neutral or ‘manly’ font for a men’s birthday card or Father’s Day project? Or maybe you’re making a T-shirt or gift where you just want a font that doesn’t scream “Live, Laugh, Love”? This article is all about the best free masculine fonts for your Cricut, Silhouette, or other cutting machine projects.
I have chosen both cutting and writing fonts in a variety of styles:
- clean, bold sans serif and serif fonts
- retro fonts
- famous fonts inspired by TV/movies and video games
These free fonts are available for personal use, and some for commercial use, but if you want to use them for commercial purposes, check the license.
Best masculine cutting fonts
I keep a folder of my favorite fonts that I think will look great on t-shirts for myself, my dad or FIL/BIL. My list includes retro fonts, logo fonts and gaming fonts. Making a t-shirt or other personalized item with vinyl is often about making the right pop culture reference. The right font can help you nail it.
Free Sans-Serif Fonts for vinyl
These are a selection of 100% free fonts that can be used for personal or commercial projects. This list covers a variety of styles, from thick to thin, modern to vintage and even futuristic. Theses fonts cover playful moods, serious projects, and even, dare I say, classy. These fonts would be great for slogans and text on men’s apparel and gifts.
Digitalt by GlukFonts (Fontspace)
Digitalt is a great upper-case block font for cutting vinyl letters for t-shirts, jerseys, signs and more. It is very popular (more than 300K downloads) and it has a full character set including Latin characters, punctuation and symbols. It is available with the SIL Open Font License “which allows embedding, or ‘bundling’ of the font in commercially sold products.”
Procrastinating Pixie by Sajid Ahmed Es (FontSpace)
Procrastinating Pixie is a very clean, futuristic looking font that will look great in HTV or adhesive vinyl. Since its introduction in 2020, this font has been downloaded over 100K times from FontSpace. On the downside, this font includes just 26 uppercase letters, no lower case, numbers or special characters. In better news, this font is 100% free, so you can use it for both personal and commercial projects.
Hagia Pro Extra Bold by Andika Fez
If you are looking for a font that is both elegant and impactful, try the 100% free version of Hagia Pro Extra Bold. This is a new font released in 2022, and it has a lot of creative details, but in this free version, you only get the basic upper and lower character set and numbers 0-9. If you want to invest in the full font family (16 styles, ranging from thin and extra light to extra bold with full character sets, you can purchase it for $28 at Creative Market.
More free masculine sans-serif fonts for cutting:
Serif fonts with a masculine vibe
Zoika Bold by Victor Zanin (Fontspace)
Not only is Zoika a classy, cool font, it is a complete character set available in the public domain for personal and commercial use.
NorthWest Bold by Tirado Co (FontSpace)
If you’re looking for a font with a retro, outdoorsy vibe, NorthWest Bold is worth looking at. The free version of this uppercase font includes A-Z with variations in upper and lower case letters, but no numbers, symbols or special characters. This is a great font to evoke the Pacific Northwest, rustic signage, dudes with lumberjack plaid and bushy beards. If that’s your jam, check out NorthWest.
Daniel Jacques by PJM Homebrew Fonts
Not only is Daniel Jaques a great reproduction of a famous brand font, it is available under SIL Open License. If you have a whisky-themed project for a dude in your life, this font provide a full set of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, symbols and special characters.
More free masculine serif fonts for cutting:
Free Retro Cutting fonts for Cricut/Silhouette
Black North by Letterhend Studio
Black North has a vintage look that is available for personal use only. It’s an uppercase font that includes several special characters and punctuation. Some really cool stuff is included in the basic commercial license, including a regular and stamp version, and bonus illustrations and premade vector logos, available for just $19.
Flames by OutsideInside Fonts
Flames is a good, all purpose “groovy” 1960s font. I’ve used it myself in HTV projects and I love the way it looks, cuts and weeds. This uppercase font includes A-Z, a full numerical set, and some basic punctuation (no exclamation point or question mark). It’s classified as freeware.
Black Castle by Rick Mueller
Black Castle is a great medieval/pirate style retro font with lines that are clean enough to easily cut and weed with a Cricut machine. It is categorized as freeware. As an extra bonus, this font includes a full upper and lower case character set, numbers, symbols and special characters.
Here’s a photo of a shirt I made using Black Castle and Caslon Antique. It looks amazing in Siser silver Metal HTV:
More free retro cutting fonts:
- Airstream
- Arbuckle
- Font Diner Swanky
- Kool Beans
- Old Town Regular
- Pau the 1st
- Peralta
- Rialto
- Startling
Free TV and Movie inspired cutting fonts
It should go without saying, these violate copyright and should be used for personal, non-commercial projects only unless you enjoy the prospect of Mickey’s lawyers sending you cease and desist letters.
Star Jedi by Boba Fonts (Fontspace)
Classic Star Wars font available in regular and outline version. This font has over 1 million downloads on FontSpace, and includes glyphs, special characters and numbers. There are some cool bonus features included, like vector logos and emblems for the Rebel Alliance, the Empire and the Madalorian clan skull.
Simpson Font by Sharkshock (Fontspace)
Some Time Later (SpongeBob font) by Fredrick Brennan (Fontspace)
More free TV and movie inspired fonts for cutting:
Video game inspired cutting fonts
Morpheus by Kiwi Media (text) and TheWitcher font by Joanna Vu (icons)
- Atari Font
- Final Fantasy
- Public Pixel
- RO Blue Shell (Mario Kart Deluxe font)
- RO Spritendo
- Sega font
Classic masculine fonts you might already have on your computer
The system fonts that come pre-installed on your computer can be a treasure trove of fonts with full character sets. Shop around your own system fonts for some clean classics. If you own a mac, Helvetica is one of the iconic typefaces that come with your OS – don’t hesitate to use it!
Although there are differences between Mac and Windows system fonts, there are some really solid, masculine choices that will give you formal, strong or even retro and light-hearted vibes.
Windows 10/11 fonts
- Franklin Gothic (sans serif)
- Georgia (serif)
- Gill Sans (sans serif)
- Arial (sans serif)
- Impact (display)
Mac OS fonts
- American Typewriter (serif)
- Charcoal
- Cooper Black
- Futura (sans serif)
- Helvetica (sans serif)
Best masculine writing fonts
Most of these fonts (serif, sans serif) were chosen because they are either single line or *very* thin when written with a Cricut Fine or Extra Fine Point pen. These fonts do not produce ‘bubble’ or outlined-looking letters when written at a reasonable size, as you would use on a card.
I also chose a handful of fonts that are not single line but look very cool when written or foiled (display fonts).
Most of these fonts have multiple line types (i.e. bold, demibold, regular, etc.), so I specified which version I used in each photo (i.e. “thin” or “light”). I wrote each font using either the Extra Fine or Fine Point Cricut pen, and I have indicated type size by including a half-inch height marker.
The majority of these fonts are personal use only, so check the notes included with the font files for commercial use requirements.
Sans Serif Writing Fonts
A ton of the writing fonts I chose were designed by Måns Grebäck, and he really has upped the ante for single line writing fonts for crafting machine users. Free writing fonts now include way more typefaces that will write as a single line with even an Extra Fine Point (0.3mm) pen – no need to use a thicker marker with any of these!
*NOTE: anything written with CNC Vector in Design Space must be ungrouped, then attached before going to the Make It screen. Highlight the text, click the ungroup icon, then click Attach.
Serif Writing Fonts
This list includes a lot of Google fonts, which are great because they have full character sets. Like the sans serif fonts, you can be confident using these as neutral or masculine written fonts for cards, labels, tags, etc.
Display Writing Fonts
I chose these because they look super cool when written or foiled, and range from fun and retro to futuristic/sci-fi. These are written in Extra Fine Point pen, but you can see the first 4 fonts foiled in our Cricut Foil hacks article.
Final Thoughts
I hope this is enough to get you started in your projects. Whether you are making a shirt for yourself, or a gift for your dad, son or brother, choosing a “masculine” font doesn’t need to be something that screams toxic masculinity. Have a sense of humor about it, choose a font that will give your project a sense of authenticity and it will be cherished for years.
If I’ve left anything out, let me know in the comments!
I am putting together a project on black card stock. Because it is black, I must use the 1.0mm metallic pens. Do you have any masculine font recommendations?
Hi Jill,
I always match my font to the style of project I’m creating, so without knowing more it’s a bit difficult to give a recommendation.
Are you interested in single line/writing fonts, or some kind of open or embellished decorative font?
The writing fonts listed in this article were drawn with 0.3/0.4mm pen to illustrate how well they write with the finest tip pens, but any of them write very nicely with a 1.0mm marker as well. With the markers, I’d keep the font size a little larger.
If you’re interested in embellished fonts that you will write in a large size, Macrame is a font that would look very cool in metallic, but again, you’d have to make the font larger and test it out to see if the details work.
You can also use a non-writing font and fill it in using insets (we have a tutorial for that here).
If you’d like to share the style of font or project theme you’re designing for, I might be able to make a more precise recommendation – feel free to let me know! Thanks for reading – Ian