Whether or not you’re a professional content developer, chances are you like fonts. And chances are you like free fonts! Okay, so maybe not the most amazing Tuesday Tip to date, but very useful nonetheless. I used to own a healthy collection of font libraries I’d buy on CD (or even floppy disk, going way back in time). But with the advent of both the internet and advertising, there a some website resources that have valuable free content. A top pick of mine is dafont.com with around 13,000 fonts to date.
I’ve used dafont.com for many years now, and their site has gotten better and better over time. You can narrow your search down by font category or by using their search engine. I especially like the ability to type in your own word or full sentence to see how the font will actually look with the word or design you’re going for; no need to download and install a font just to find out it looks horrible with the word you want to use it on. This makes browsing and selection of fonts incredibly fast.
Typing in your own sentence for font previews saves bandwidth and time from needless font installations for testing. Note the second font doesn't have a period symbol in its character set. Something to watch out for when selecting fonts if you need more than just alpha-numeric characters in your design.
And just because these fonts are free doesn’t mean they’re crap. There are honestly some truly great fonts in there. But be aware that some fonts carry some usage restrictions, namely if you’re using it for commercial use. Each font clearly explains what the usage rights are (even before you download it), from totally free, to personal usage only, and donation requested. If there is a restriction for commercial use, it’s sometimes required that the font creator simply wants to be notified and receive credit if it’s used. Fair enough. Each font comes with a clearly written terms-of-use text file contained within the zip file you download. You don’t even need to register on the website… just download to your heart’s content!
It’s these kind of web-based technologies that make the internet so damn cool.
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