14 Examples of Trendy Websites with Oversized Experimental Typography

One of the most important aspects of any visual presentation is choosing the right fonts. And although the right tone and message are the base of any business, the visual performance will make it get across and impact. Oversized and experimental typography is a raising trend that helps designers accomplish that and unleash creativity to build eye-catching modern websites. This is why in this blog post we hand-picked 14 creative oversized experimental typography examples in the wild that will inspire you to try out this trend.

At the end of this post, we also answered the 3 most common questions about oversized and experimental typography.

Update Oct 2023: The UI/UX Design Trends of 2023 are out to replace minimalism with bolder, more diverse, and more experimental digital experiences. Check them out.

Examples of Websites with Oversized Experimental Typography

Let’s dive into some recent live or conceptual web design creations that use experimental typography to create a memorable user experience.

1. Charlie Le Maignan: Animated Experimental Typography

This portfolio website showcases the work of a Paris-based graphic and interactive designer who creates motion and typography. Right from the hero section, Charlie demonstrates some homebrew fonts decorated with experimental animations and effects.

• Experimental typography animations and effects purely for demonstration.

Live Website:  Charlie Le Maignan / Designed by:  Charlie Le Maignan (France)

 

2. Likely Story: Oversized Fonts and Parallaxes

This joyful site grabs attention with 3D characters and typography with personality. Staying on trend, the design uses oversized fonts for titles and background messages and mixes them with a nice parallax effect.

• The oversized main and background titles create a distinctive hierarchy.
• Subtle parallax effect.

Live Website:  Likely Story / Designed by:  Likely Story (UK)

 

3. Elva Design: Animated Typographic Hero With Personality

Elva is a design group creating branded e-commerce experiences, specializing in digital strategy, UI/UX, and motion. The hero section showcases simple, yet effective typography animation that replaces letters with icons.

• Simple but effective typography animation.
• Custom font and icons reinforce the brand.

Live Website:  Elva Design / Designed by:  Non-Linear Studio (USA)

 

4. Design Embraced: Trippy and Distorted

The portfolio of creative director and designer Anthony Goodwin goes further with typography experiments by adding an interactive distortion effect on hover.

• Clean background with oversized typography, floating images on scroll, and distortion effects on hover.

Live Website:  Design Embraced / Designed by:  Design Embraced (UK)

 

5. Playground Paris: Playing Around With Colors

Another great example of a typographic hero with oversized fonts, this time experimenting with colorful effects on hover. Reading the title description gets fun, which is pretty fitting for a graphic design studio named Playground.

• Custom big bold fonts with colorful hover effects.

Live Website:  Playground Paris

 

6. Angela Milosevic: Dark and Surrealistic

The portfolio site for art director and digital designer Angela Milosevic greets you with an overlay image and oversized typography with custom fonts and a dark surrealistic vibe.

• Beautiful custom oversized fonts and clean design.
• Smooth overlay image scrolling transition.

Live Website:  Angela Milosevic / Designed by:  Angela Milosevic (USA)

 

7. Venus Story of the Goddess: A Giant Font with Horizontal Scrolling

VENUS is a non-commercial project by Loonar Studios inspired by the beauty and sexuality of the Roman goddess and universal muse, Venus. This educational website is experimental and uses a great combination of mixed vertical and horizontal scrolling, transitions, and animations, as well as giant oversized custom fonts.

• The giant oversized message reveals itself with horizontal scrolling.

Live Website:  Venus Story of the Goddess / Designed by:  Loonar Studios (Ukraine)

 

8. Revolt: Revolting Against Symmetry by Mixing Fonts and Alignments

Revolt is a one-stop shop for seamless influencer merchandising. The design follows the brand’s gimmick by breaking the symmetry and successfully mixing fonts and alignments. Good designers know there are ways to break the rules of typography without suffering the consequences.

• Intentionally and artistically broken typography design.

Live Website:  Revolt / Designed by:  Holographik (Croatia)

 

9. Eyes Sprint: Warping Typography Animation

Another way to welcome users is with an unexpected animation of typography that consists of your brand’s name. Eyesprint uses oversized typography to design a mesmerizing warping element that serves as the homepage hero screen.

• Kinetic typography with an oversized font with the brand’s name.

Live Website:  Eyes Sprint / Designed by:  Hammer Albrecht (Austria)

 

10. Jeans for Refugees: Jeans Built by Jeans

 

Jeans for Refugees is a global fundraising initiative created by artist Johny Dar. Celebrities donate their jeans to Dar and he paints them to raise money and auction them off. The website uses an interesting typography morph transition of tiny jeans elements that build the titles.

• Unconventional typography morph transition.

Live Website:  Jeans for Refugees  / Designed by:  Hello Monday (USA)

 

11. Martine Syms: Magazine Layout with Oversized Fonts

MARTINE SYMS is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Her grid-based website uses big bold fonts, oversized titles, and harsh color combinations.

• The oversized fonts suit the magazine style perfectly making it easy to create a text hierarchy.

Live Website:  Martine Syms/ Designed by: Special Offer, Inc. (USA)

 

12. USSR Design Almanac: Dynamic Typography and Scroll Animations

A design almanac with some of the best works made in the USSR. The collection includes cars, photos, architecture, graphic design, and more, all perfectly compiled in an interactive museum website with many transitions, animations, and experimental typography animations.

• Oversized typography with custom retro style font in the spirit of the website’s topic.
• Typography scroll animation.

Live Website:  USSR Design Almanac / Designed by:  Obys Agency (Ukraine)

 

13. Zona de Propulsao: The Bigger the Better

Zona focuses on oversized titles and typography animation to give incredible dynamics to the user experience. With multiple transitions, mixed scrolling, and moving text, this interactive grid-based website is living in the future already ahead of the rising UI/UX design trends of 2023.

• Oversized experimental typography with animations and mixed scrolling.

Live Website:  Zona de Propulsao / Designed by: Phellipe (Brazil)

 

14. Minimal Wim:

What’s more experimental than experimental oversized typography? How about a typeface equally illegible in oversized texts as in small texts? This awesome experience is dedicated to the pioneer Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel showcases his grid-based typography. As an alternative experiment even receives Awwward’s SOTD.

• An illegible grid-based typeface in an amazing dynamic presentation.

Live Website:  Minimal Wim / Designed  by:  Booreiland (Netherlands)

 

FAQ About Experimental Typography

In typography design, experimental refers to anything unconventional that defies categorization and expectations. This might mean anything from intentionally breaking the rules of typography to experimenting with letter spacing and form spacing, alignments and combining various-sized fonts, stacking letters vertically and horizontally, or replacing letters with symbols.

Experimental typography encourages designers to use all the resources the digital form can offer to manipulate letters and shapes, add complex lighting or create engaging typography animations. Other techniques include:

• Mixing multiple typefaces regardless of how similar or different they are.
• Layering typefaces, placing letters over each other.
• Applying different colors to create a pattern.
• Adding artistically illustrated letters.
• Sculpting letters from elements.
• Using different textures, depths, and tones.
• 3D fonts.
• Large oversized typography.

 

Type Experiment by Andrew Colin Beck

Experimental typography involves the process of arranging fonts and letters to evoke a certain emotion or convey a message. Lettering, on the other hand, refers to designing individual letters, which does not influence the composition.

At its core, experimental typography is an attitude and a conceptual approach to a given design solution, while lettering defines the medium: typography, calligraphy, etc. Lettering in itself isn’t experimental if it doesn’t involve the use of innovative or challenging techniques.

36 Days of Type by Ethan Fender

Oversized typography (or large typography) refers to extremely sized fonts with large weight. They serve to grab attention with their extravagant dramatic design. In web design, oversized typography goes way further than just big fonts in the hero section. As it raises the entire typography scale which results in larger font options for the entire website.

Most common scales have set sizes for H1 to h6 and body text to create consistency, logic, and contrast. It’s the same case for oversized typography, however, the smallest body text is big and from there it gets bigger, to an enormous H1.

 

To Sum Up

Oversized typography can transform any text into a captivating visual element. Whether it’s used in extra large fonts and animations or more subtly, it depends on the context and what you wish visitors to focus on. Usually, this technique works best with a simple background and high contrast between the font and the background. When it comes to trends, however, oversized typography works best with animations. You can capture attention with moving text, transitions on scroll, hover effects, and other creative ways to give life to your typography.

We hope these 14 excellent oversized experimental typography examples inspired you to top them with even more amazing designs of your own.

In the meantime, you can visit some of the UI/UX-related articles for some more insights and inspiration:

• 20 UI/UX Design Trends that will Rock 2023
• 14 Rebellious Websites With Broken Grid Layouts
• 18 Examples of Trendy Websites with Typographic Hero Images