Sans, serif, slab and more. What kind of typefaces are being designed and how many exist today?
Type.lol holds 17,106 active typefaces from independent foundries, and 13,290 of them carry a reconciled classification. Ten labels cover all of it.
| Classification | Typefaces | Share |
|---|---|---|
| sans | 6,131 | 46.1% |
| serif | 2,661 | 20.0% |
| display | 2,225 | 16.7% |
| script | 1,324 | 10.0% |
| mono | 485 | 3.6% |
| slab | 273 | 2.1% |
| blackletter | 74 | 0.6% |
| handwritten | 58 | 0.4% |
| symbols | 44 | 0.3% |
| pixel | 15 | 0.1% |
A classification can carry a second, narrower label. Only 50% of reconciled typefaces have one, and the two biggest categories barely draw on the same vocabulary as each other.
| Sub-label | Typefaces |
|---|---|
| geometric | 1,265 |
| grotesque | 693 |
| humanist | 470 |
| display | 140 |
| neo-grotesque | 122 |
| modern | 114 |
| old style | 82 |
| rounded | 34 |
| industrial | 25 |
| condensed | 22 |
| experimental | 19 |
| stencil | 19 |
| Sub-label | Typefaces |
|---|---|
| old style | 451 |
| modern | 312 |
| transitional | 213 |
| display | 89 |
| didone | 68 |
| humanist | 49 |
| slab | 30 |
| geometric | 29 |
| grotesque | 21 |
| venetian | 14 |
| clarendon | 12 |
| text | 12 |
The raw field holds 480 distinct sub-labels, and 298 of them appear on exactly one typeface and never again. Nobody is wrong to call a face reverse-contrast. It just is not a category, because a category is a thing more than one person puts something into.
3,816 active typefaces carry no reconciled classification at all, which is 22% of the catalogue.
Every figure counts active typefaces only, and only those carrying the reconciled classification scalar. Classification is extracted by a model reading each foundry’s own release pages. Nobody has read these one by one: in August 2026 about 4,500 rows were cross-checked against the foundries’ own catalogue listings by a script, which is what “reconciled” means here. Fifty-seven typefaces carry a classification a human has edited directly.
This is not adjudicated against a type-historical taxonomy, and it is not Vox-ATypI. Type.lol documents independent foundries by editorial policy, so all of this is the shape of independent type, not all of type.