Fonts similar to Calibri: 5 free Calibri font alternatives

Calibri Font is one of the ugliest fonts ever invented by mankind, I hold it up there with other design fails such the infamous Comic Sans MS. Beyond that, Microsoft decided to make it the default font for all its Microsoft Office Suite, so we’ve been forced to see it almost anywhere.

Using Calibri for a presentation speaks almost too much about you, especially if you call yourself a designer of any sort. I can read that you didn’t bother to find a replacement font for your document, or even worse, that you thought it looked good. We actually made sure that the font would never be an option on our presentation software. 

But fear not, here are some amazing alternatives so you never have to use Calibri again. Prepare to awe your audience! 

Using Calibri for a presentation speaks almost too much about you, especially if you call yourself a designer of any sort.

Related Read: Fonts to Avoid Default Fonts

Open Sans

This has become one of the most widespread used fonts of the decade and Google owns a little bit of this credit to the startup community. It’s a great and simple Sans-serif font that adapts as its being integrated on websites all over the world. I’m sure you have recognised it.

The trend these days seems to be associated to lightweight fonts, so using that Open Sans-300 is also a good way to go if you want to look trendy.

Open Sans is the font used on the Scala layout on Slidebean.

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Alégre Sans

Alégre Sans is a beautiful, sans-serif capitalised font that we find particularly attractive for headers. In a way, it’s a beautiful an graceful version of the well-known Impact. It is of course, not recommended for body text on your slide, as an all-caps font can come across as aggressive to your audience if you are not careful.

Alégre Sans is also available on some Slidebean Premium templates.

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Poiret One

A round and elegant lightweight sans-serif font with a Retro and Art Deco style. I find it particularly interesting if you want your presentation to stand out without being over the top. Using some vintage and/or rounded shapes on your slides will of course be a plus.

Poiret One was designed by Denis Masharov and is available for download as part of the Google Fonts package. Still, it’s not a very common choice so I don’t believe anyone will recognise it.

Helvetica Neue

Of course you might complain that the world is a bit tired of Helvetica, and I might have to agree; this is the font used by Apple for most of the iOS 7 interface, by the US Government in most of their forms and the NYC Subway, if you hadn’t noticed. Nevertheless, Helvetica is still worldwide accepted as one of the most beautiful fonts ever designed.

It represents a slight but notable improvement from Helvetica and includes a bunch of new variants, including the lovely Helvetica Neue UltraLight, Helvetica Neue Thin and Helvetica Neue Medium.

Although Helvetica is a paid font owned by Linotype, it’s available for free on every Apple Computer and that is why it’s made it to the list. Sadly, you can still spot some Mac-users using Calibri.

Raleway

Another Google Font, this one actually represents a great free alternative to Helvetica Ultralight. It was designed originally as a lightweight typeface and later evolved to add new, bolder variants.

I’d recommend sticking somewhere between Thin (100) and Normal (400), as the 700+ thinkness versions don’t look that good after all. Using lightweight fonts on presentations is great if you want to add large titles or short amounts of text (which is what you always aim for anyways).

Raleway is our font of choice for the Slidebean layout ‘Polygon’, available on the Free version.

Enjoy your presentation making. Please don’t ever let me see you using Calibri again.

2021 update: Granted. Calibri is one of the recommended fonts for people with dyslexia. I stand by my point. However, you can consider this and other recommended fonts if you know your audience can have a better reading experience with it.