I first discovered the, uh, joys of grunge way back in the early 90’s, when I wore too much flannel and had Pearl Jam as the background of my answering machine message. Grunge-style design, on the other hand, has lasted much, much longer than my favorite pair of ripped jeans- and when it comes to grunge fonts, there seem to be hundreds of them. How to weed out the best of the bunch? Here are my top five favorite free grunge-style fonts:

a-bite
This beauty of a grunge font, by Billy Argel, tops my list. It’s big and bold and unmistakeably grunge, with some lovely distressing and just the right amount of unevenness.

Karabine
Jonathan Paquette is an awesome font designer. This one is a little cleaner around the edges, but still definitely grunge, and the reversed letters are a nice touch.

Trashed
Whether you go all-caps (as shown here) or not, Trashed is a great headliner font- and because it’s nice and messy yet still very readable, it would be good for posters or blocks of text as well. Its maker, Last Soundtrack also designed another of my favorite fonts, which I posted about previously.

Shortcut
If you haven’t yet seen misprinted type’s font offerings, go. Now. Well, after reading this post, anyway. They make some gorgeous fonts, and Shortcut is among my favorites. It looks “stamped” to me, which is an effect I have a difficult time creating as a designer, so yay!

Bill Hicks
And finally, this one by The Devil in Jason Ramirez. Again, this is not as “dirty” as the other fonts on this list, but I think marries goth and grunge, and- oh, well, whatever, nevermind.

Do you have a favorite grunge font?