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Suggestions Free Font Websites

" SQUIRT "

New Member
What's your favorite free font website !? I know of a few , and have found some good fonts that I could use for different projects , but maybe there some other sites that I don't know about, and can be useful for other projects !?
In advance, Thanks for your input, its appreciated !
" SQUIRT "
 

Jeff grossman

Living the dream
from an earlier post
3FCE9995-C49D-45C4-9896-2E300999806A.jpeg
 

rjssigns

Active Member
In my experience "free" fonts are more trouble than they're worth. Beginning of every semester I warn students about using "cool" fonts from the web but some insist and do it anyway. More often than I care to count I see students in a cold sweat wondering why their project won't package or print or "why is it doing that"? Close to 100% of the time it's font related.

Some of the free fonts are so poorly constructed even turning them into outlines doesn't work. Not to mention kerning pair issues, leading, tracking etc...it runs the gamut.
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
rjsigns said:
In my experience "free" fonts are more trouble than they're worth.

I pretty much evaluate free fonts on a case by case basis.

It's true that the vast majority of free or open source fonts out there are garbage. But there are truly free fonts (including for commercial use) out there that are actually really good and meet standards you see in commercial fonts. The Font Squirrel web site is pretty selective on what fonts it offers. The quality standards are quite a bit higher, plus all of them can be used for commercial purposes. Some of the fonts at Font Squirrel are selected free weights from larger commercial type families. I haven't run into any problems with any of the fonts at the Google Fonts site. Sometimes the same type families are hosted at both Font Squirrel and Google Fonts. Even Adobe Fonts has some of the Google Fonts available in their service.

It's also interesting that quite a few commercial type designers will design one or more free type families as a means of advertising themselves in order to sell commercial fonts. Some type foundries will have a mix of free and commercial/paid fonts on their sites.

The only time I'll use a garbage quality free font from a site like DaFont is if a customer has existing artwork or branding materials that uses it and doesn't want it changed to something better in terms of type quality.
 

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
It's true that the vast majority of free or open source fonts out there are garbage.

I would say cost would be more of an issue then developmental model (as both developmental models can cost the end user). If someone is doing it for free (especially if that also includes commercial use), there may not have been as much time to handle the nuances that really make a good commercial font. Such as these:

Some of the free fonts are so poorly constructed even turning them into outlines doesn't work. Not to mention kerning pair issues, leading, tracking etc...it runs the gamut.

I would also add in the availability of alternates as well don't seem to make it into the free fonts.

Google fonts (which is also open source if I recall correctly) and Font Squirrel are resources that I like. For Google fonts (if I'm using it for development) also work because they can be linked and not statically used as well (I do browser based games as well), so that is a nicety with that resource as well. Not very handy in this instance, just another nicety of that service that I like.

I highly caution using DaFont, even thought that is the most often used one or at least cited. Especially in the business use world. A lot of people don't realize (and this was already posted above) is that commercial use is usually not allowed (I actually rarely see commercial use also permitted without having to purchase a license). But more importantly, you have, a lot of the time, concerns that rjsigns mentioned.

I would also suggest evaluating on a case by case basis as not all free fonts are bad, the odds of it being so, quite a bit higher, but there are some diamonds in the rough out there.
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
WildWestDesigns said:
I would also add in the availability of alternates as well don't seem to make it into the free fonts.

Many of the higher quality free fonts, such as those found at Font Squirrel or Google Fonts, have extended character sets that go well beyond 1990's style fonts with no more than 256 glyphs. Many have character sets covering multiple languages (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Middle East and Far East languages). Some have number sets with proportional lining and tabular lining, numerator and denominator figures and even custom fractions (like 1/7). Some include true small capitals characters. And it's not hard to find fonts that have alternates for various uppercase and lowercase characters.

Montserrat is currently one of the most popular free typefaces available. The latest OpenType version has 36 weights with each font file boasting over 1900 glyphs. It covers most of the extended OpenType features available, including alternate upper/lowercase characters and true small capitals.

Some of the highest quality free fonts obviously have corporate backing from companies like Google or Mozilla.
 

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
Many of the higher quality free fonts, such as those found at Font Squirrel or Google Fonts, have extended character sets that go well beyond 1990's style fonts with no more than 256 glyphs. Many have character sets covering multiple languages (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Middle East and Far East languages). Some have number sets with proportional lining and tabular lining, numerator and denominator figures and even custom fractions (like 1/7). Some include true small capitals characters. And it's not hard to find fonts that have alternates for various uppercase and lowercase characters.

Montserrat is currently one of the most popular free typefaces available. The latest OpenType version has 36 weights with each font file boasting over 1900 glyphs. It covers most of the extended OpenType features available, including alternate upper/lowercase characters and true small capitals.

Some of the highest quality free fonts obviously have corporate backing from companies like Google or Mozilla.

I guess I should have prefaced that with free fonts coming from places like dafont.
 
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