Fantastic Free Fonts

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Typography is an essential part of design. And the good news for web and DTP designers is that you can pick up thousands of brilliant Windows TrueType and Macintosh fonts straight across the Internet (often directly from the designers themselves!)

This section points you to some of the best typographic resources on the Internet we know about - the ones we turn to ourselves when we're looking for that "something extra"

All the fonts listed here are either freeware or shareware. If a font is freeware it's yours to keep. But if it's shareware then you really should buy a copy from the author at the end of your free trial period.

Trialware fonts also exist on the Net. Trialware fonts. These fonts are generally supplied with a few key letters missing from the trial pack or are watermarked in some way. Trialware packs are useful if you want to try out a commercial font that you intend to buy, but generally of no use if you don't.

 

Free Font Resources Fontastic! An awesome European site that provides hundreds of beautiful freeware and shareware Windows TrueType fonts for downloading. This site began operating in late 1996 and used to be one of the largest font repositories in the world. While this is no longer the case, it still contains many, many delightful fonts and all of them can be downloaded as freeware. Larabie Fonts Every so often - usually when there's nothing on TV - Ray Larabie creates a new Windows TrueType freeware font and posts it to the Web for downloading just to prove it can be done. Contrary to what you might expect, most of the fonts he creates are high quality and very useful. 20,000 people visit this site every month. It's worth seeing. FontHead Design FontHead are a professional type design studio who offer several brilliantly whimsical Windows TrueType and Macintosh freeware fonts including Good Dog (in three varieties), Holstein and Spillmilk. We love these fonts and you probably will too! FontHead Design's commercial fonts are equally attractive and very economically priced (around US$15 to US$30 each). Surface Type Surface Type were another professional type design studio that's now closed. However, the old Surface Type site still offers seven useful Windows TrueType and Macintosh type faces as freeware downloads: Acidic, Bountiful, Bounty, Gouge, Ozlo, Packet and Slurry. Microsoft Typography In the late 1990s Microsoft released a small set of standardised fonts for the web (Arial, Tahoma, Georgia, Courier, Comic, Times New Roman, Impact, Trebuchet and Verdana) and distributed them with all their products. As a result these fonts are now almost universally available and if you've ever purchased a Microsoft product you probably already have them (along with many other fonts that Microsoft have distributed). Microsoft Typography allows you to check what fonts were released with what product, and it also provides a lot of very good plain-English advice about fonts and typography in general. Chank Fonts Font designer Chank Diesel's Chank Fonts is a very famous site and is worth visiting whether you download any of their extensive hand-crafted range of fonts or not. While most of Chank Fonts font designs are commercial, they also have more than 60 terrific TTF fonts available for download as freeware. GetFreeFonts.Info GetFreeFonts.Info is a very large free font repository that makes in excess of 2500 free TTF fonts available for download at no charge. You can search for fonts alphabetically by name and see samples of each font as well. SearchFreeFonts.Com SearchFreeFonts.Com is another large free font repository that contains more than 13,000 TTF fonts - some of which are free, and some of which are commercial. Again, you can search for fonts alphabetically and you can also search by font style (eg: script fonts, decorative fonts etc). Free fonts can be downloaded instantly, and commercial fonts can be downloaded from the type foundry that retails them. Urban Fonts Urban Fonts is another very large free fonts site that has several thousand free fonts available for download, including some that are unique to this site alone. Fonts are available in both Windows and Mac formats and you can search for them alphabetically by name or by font category. Fonts101.Com Fonts101.Com operate what is probably the largest free fonts site on the Net, with in excess of 30,000 fonts available for download. You can search for fonts by name or category; preview text in any font you choose; and either download fonts directly or have them emailed to you. All fonts are Windows TTF only (ie no Mac fonts).