The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Knockout vs Archivo
Two grotesques that both look back to late-nineteenth-century American job printing. Knockout is Hoefler&Co's commercial display family, drawn in nine individually designed widths named after boxing weight classes, while Archivo is Omnibus-Type's open-source take on the same tradition, shipped as a single variable font with weight and width axes.
Knockout is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Oswald, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Knockout →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Knockout (Jonathan Hoefler, 1994) grew out of Champion Gothic and the condensed wood-type gothics of American posters, and it is essentially a display design meant for large sizes.
- Archivo (Héctor Gatti and Omnibus-Type, first released 2012) was also drawn for headlines, but it was built as a high-performance family for both print and screen and supports over 200 languages.
- Knockout's range comes as 32 separate styles across nine widths, each drawn by hand with its own proportions; Archivo covers Thin to Black and ExtraCondensed to Expanded through a variable weight axis (100–900) and width axis (62–125).
- Knockout is commercial and licensed per style through Hoefler&Co, so a full-width lineup carries real cost, whereas Archivo is free under the SIL Open Font License.
Knockout
Reach for Knockout when you want the authentic wood-type punch of a nine-width American gothic for headlines, branding, and packaging, and the license budget is not a constraint.
Archivo
Reach for Archivo when you need that late-nineteenth-century grotesque flavor across both display and body text, with free licensing and a variable file that lets you dial width and weight on the web.