What Font Does GTA Use?

The letters are Pricedown, a free font by Ray Larabie. The logo is more than the font, though, and the licence has limits worth knowing.

The short answer: Pricedown

The Grand Theft Auto logo uses Pricedown, a display font by the Canadian type designer Ray Larabie. He drew it in the late 1990s after the logo of the game show The Price Is Right, and it is now published by Typodermic Fonts, the foundry he founded in 2001.

Pricedown is heavy, condensed and slightly playful: thick vertical strokes, squared-off bowls, a tall x-height and letters that lock tightly together. That density is why three short words can be stacked into a compact block without gaps, which is exactly how every GTA logo uses it.

Why typed Pricedown does not look like the logo

Install the font, type "grand theft auto" and the result looks flat. The logo is not just text set in a font. It is a small piece of artwork with several layers, and the GTA VI logo is the most layered one yet.

• Three stacked lines. "grand", "theft" and "auto" sit on separate lines with almost no space between them, so the block reads as one shape.
• White letters with a dark ink outline. The fill is an off-white, not pure white, and the outline is a very dark purple rather than black.
• A thin coloured rim outside the outline. On GTA VI it is a hot pink that picks up the colour of the numeral.
• A big numeral behind the words. The V and the I sit either side of the text block, filled with a gradient that runs from blue-violet through purple and pink to orange, like a Florida sunset.
• Edges on the numeral too: a dark ink edge, a coloured rim and a thin pale line inside it, so the numeral reads clearly against busy artwork.
• A soft shadow under everything, which lifts the logo off the panels behind it.

Building the look in a design app

If you want to recreate it in Photoshop, Affinity, Figma or Canva, work in this order. The order matters more than the exact colours.

1. Set the numeral first, very large, and fill it with a four-stop vertical gradient.
2. Give the numeral a pale inner stroke, then a coloured stroke, then a thick dark stroke outside both.
3. Type the three words in Pricedown on separate lines, lowercase, and tighten the line spacing until the lines nearly touch.
4. Fill the words off-white, add a dark outline, then a thinner coloured rim outside that.
5. Add one soft drop shadow in the same dark colour to the whole group.
6. Keep each word short. Four to eight letters per line looks like the real thing; long words make the block too wide.

What the free licence covers

Typodermic offers Pricedown for free under its Desktop License. That licence lets one person install the font on their own computer and use it in finished artwork, commercial or not, including logos, social media graphics, print, packaging and merchandise.

It does not cover embedding the font in a website, an app or a game, giving the font file to someone else (a friend, a client or a print shop), or editing and converting the font. If you need any of those, buy the matching licence from Typodermic. Always read the licence file that comes with the download, because download sites do not all describe it the same way.

One more point that has nothing to do with the font: the Grand Theft Auto name, the logo artwork and the cover art belong to Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive. A free font does not make their logo free to use. Fan posters, party invites and profile pictures for personal use are one thing; selling merchandise with the GTA logo on it is another.

Make GTA logo text in the maker

The GTA font generator on this site does the layering for you. It is fan-made and not affiliated with Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive.

1. Open the Text tab. Type up to three lines of up to 16 characters each, and a numeral of up to 4 characters.
2. Two-character numerals like VI or 30 split either side of the words. Longer numerals are centred behind the words and shrink to fit; long words are squeezed to the logo width.
3. Pick a template to change the gradient and rim colour: GTA VI, Vice City, Los Santos, Birthday, Match day, Stag / bachelor, Road trip, Squad or Wedding.
4. To fill the numeral with a photo instead of a gradient, press Fill with a photo under Numeral fill.
5. Press Download and choose Logo only for a transparent PNG cropped to the logo, or any other size to keep the photo collage behind it.

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