Cool fonts for names, bios and gamer tags

“Cool” covers several looks, from old-world to digital. Here is “Midnight drop” in each style featured above, with the feel it gives and the kind of account it suits.

Old English and outline are the two to reach for first. They keep small letters, show on nearly every current phone and still look sharp at bio size. Black squares and glitch text work more like seasoning: one word of either does the job, and a whole line is hard work for the reader.

Gamer tags and handles often end in a number, like a birth year or a shirt number, and these six styles treat digits very differently. Here is “Night Owl 99” in each one:

Outline is the only one of the six with matching digits, so it suits a name built around a number, a release date or a score. Next to Old English or bold cursive, plain digits can look thin. One fix is to convert just the number with the Bold (serif) style and paste it after the name, as in 𝔑𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱 𝔒𝔴𝔩 𝟗𝟗: the heavier digits tend to sit better beside dark letters.

Glitch text keeps your letters and piles marks on top of and underneath each one. Unicode has a set of combining marks, the same kind of character that can turn e into é, and each one attaches itself to the character before it. Unicode doesn't cap how many can stack, so a letter wearing six marks above and six below grows into the lines around it.

The generator has a light version, Glitch, with one or two marks above and below each letter, and a heavy one, Zalgo, with up to six. After you post, the result depends on the app: some draw every mark and let the text bleed into the line above, while others trim or squash the stack. The letters underneath are ordinary, but with marks attached the word no longer reliably matches a plain search, and a screen reader may try to announce the marks.

• Use the light style for a word or two, and save Zalgo for a single word in a horror or Halloween post.
• Put a blank line above and below a glitched line in a caption, so the marks have room and don't run into other text.
• Never glitch anything that has to be read exactly, like a date, a price or a discount code.

The currency style builds each letter from a money sign, or a crossed letter that resembles one. To a person, ₥łĐ₦ł₲Ⱨ₮ reads as Midnight. To software it is a string of symbols: ₳ is the sign of the old Argentine austral, ฿ the Thai baht, ₦ the Nigerian naira, ₱ the peso sign used in the Philippines, ₩ the Korean won and ₴ the Ukrainian hryvnia.

A few things follow from that. There is only one form per letter, so capitals and small letters come out the same. J, Q and V have no money look-alike and stay as plain capitals. A screen reader may read the word as a list of currency names. And in a shop's bio, keep the style well away from real prices, where ₱ or ₦ beside a number could pass for an actual currency.

• Pick one cool style per profile. Old English in the name and outline in the bio pull in different directions.
• Avoid black squares for words with A, B, O or P in them. 🅰 🅱 🅾 and 🅿 are also emoji, and some phones draw them as coloured buttons.
• Skip faux Cyrillic if any of your audience reads Russian, Ukrainian or another language written in Cyrillic: to them it spells nonsense.
• Keep your name in plain letters somewhere on the profile so people searching for it can find you.
• Look at the post on a second phone. A style that looks crisp in the generator can come out thinner, or with gaps, on another device.