By Mark Johnson · Founder, Type.lol ·
These figures use the current Type.lol catalog and may change as records are added or corrected. They describe our catalog, not a census of the type industry. When citing a figure, include the date you accessed this page.
Sans, serif, slab and more. What kind of typefaces are being designed and how many exist today?
Type.lol holds 23,066 active typefaces from independent foundries, and 16,695 of them carry a reconciled classification. Ten labels cover all of it.
| Classification | Typefaces | Share |
|---|---|---|
| sans | 6,914 | 41.4% |
| serif | 3,257 | 19.5% |
| display | 3,152 | 18.9% |
| script | 1,874 | 11.2% |
| mono | 508 | 3.0% |
| slab | 359 | 2.2% |
| handwritten | 338 | 2.0% |
| blackletter | 159 | 1.0% |
| symbols | 87 | 0.5% |
| pixel | 35 | 0.2% |
| mixed | 10 | 0.1% |
| sans-serif | 2 | 0.0% |
A classification can carry a second, narrower label. Only 40% of reconciled typefaces have one, and the two biggest categories barely draw on the same vocabulary as each other.
| Sub-label | Typefaces |
|---|---|
| geometric | 1,255 |
| grotesque | 701 |
| humanist | 464 |
| display | 140 |
| neo-grotesque | 121 |
| modern | 110 |
| old style | 82 |
| rounded | 34 |
| industrial | 25 |
| condensed | 22 |
| experimental | 19 |
| stencil | 19 |
| Sub-label | Typefaces |
|---|---|
| old style | 452 |
| modern | 300 |
| transitional | 212 |
| display | 89 |
| didone | 69 |
| humanist | 47 |
| slab | 29 |
| geometric | 28 |
| grotesque | 21 |
| venetian | 13 |
| clarendon | 12 |
| text | 12 |
The raw field holds 500 distinct sub-labels, and 316 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.
6,371 active typefaces carry no reconciled classification at all, which is 28% 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.