Free Fonts and Typographic Resources
Design // May 8
Fonts can be expensive. Sure, there are a couple of websites that offer free fonts - but they are in most cases rather poorly designed and really should never be used in any professional work, unless modified.
I’d like to link to a couple of websites that I’ve discovered to be very helpful in regards to typography. Some offer free high quality fonts while others are tools that can assist when designing type or selecting a typeface to use on your website.
Exljbris is the type library of typographer Jos Buivenga where you can find 8 extremely high quality free fonts. Delicious, Fontin, Fontin Sans, Tallys, Fertigo, Diavlo, Anivers and Museo. Unlike other free font sites like Dafont and 1001 Free Fonts which offer a huge range of typefaces, Exljbris goes for quality over quantity. All 8 typefaces are beautiful and highly recommended by me.
FontShop have a page that features a freebie font offer. While there is only one font available at a time, the font is usually absolutely top quality, and comes with a detailed PDF document with examples and notes on the typeface. The font is rotated approximately once a month, so it is worth a regular visit.
While there are no free fonts available at Typophile, it is a great resource to keep handy. Reviews, blogs, portfolios and news about everything you could possible think of and more related to typography. A great site, worthy of a visit every now and then.
Identifont is a fantastic typographic resource. It boasts a very unique tool; a method of identifying a font based on it’s appearance. You simply answer a series of questions and the tool will narrow your options down as far as it can before revealing a list of all the possible typefaces. You can even restrict your query down to just the letters you have access to, so that you will be able to answer every question in the best possible way.
Type Tester is more of a web designer’s typographic tool than anything else. Using this tool, a web designer can preview what their text will look like on the web before coding their CSS. Even better, is the fact that using the three-column view, one can compare three different CSS styles simultaneously and see what works best. Definitely a must-have for any web-designer.
Have you got your own typographic tools that are worthy of mention? Feel free to leave a comment here and I’ll add them if they deserve it. Everyone knows about Dafont and 1001 Free Fonts so please don’t post those!
Hey Designoir! Thanks for the helpful links, how about dafont? Keep up the good work mate site is looking great!
We all know about Dafont! Dafont is ok, but these sites are PRO. All the fonts on Dafont really need to be edited a lot before being acceptable by my standards.