The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Aeonik vs Elza
Two commercial neo-grotesques that both get filed under 'clean modern sans', but they come from opposite directions. CoType's Aeonik, by Mark Bloom and Joe Leadbeater, puts a neo-grotesque on a geometric skeleton, while Daniel Sabino's Elza for Blackletra follows Helvetica and Univers and deliberately aims for a type family with no distinguishable features.
Aeonik is a commercial font, so it is shown here in DM Sans, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Aeonik → Elza is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Archivo, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Elza →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Aeonik pairs geometric roundness in letters like c, e, and o with strict perpendicular terminals on a, t, f, and j, which gives it a crisp, engineered character.
- Elza has subtle straight segments on the sides of its round letters, so it looks squarer and more mechanized, and that keeps its normal and condensed widths consistent.
- Elza is the larger system, with 58 fonts across 8 weights, 3 widths, and 2 optical sizes, but it has obliques instead of true italics; Aeonik has 8 weights from Air to Black, each with a matching italic.
- Aeonik's companion versions extend past Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic to Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and Hangul, while Elza ships about 900 glyphs per font with small caps, old-style and tabular figures, and a one-storey a alternate.
- Both are paid commercial fonts with no free tier, so licensing cost is part of the choice: Blackletra sells Elza at USD 300 for the complete static family or USD 750 for the variable version, and CoType sells Aeonik with purchase and trial options and variable fonts included with full-family purchases.
Aeonik
Reach for Aeonik when you want a confident brand voice for logotypes and headlines that still holds up in longer text, as it does for Revolut and Eurosport.
Elza
Reach for Elza when you need a quiet, neutral workhorse with deep width and optical-size range, especially for layouts that rely on condensed styles.