FontDiscovery 🖼️ 79: What Are Some Places to Get Free Fonts for Creative Projects?
I'm Hua, a designer and bootstrapping founder building Typogram, a brand design tool. We just launched our pre-order, check it out!⭐
Hey Everyone 👋
Hope you had a fantastic weekend!
I started working on the next edition of interactive typography jargon buster the last couple of days. This time, I'm trying out a new process for building the interactive components. Typically, I create them by coding from scratch. This time I am making it directly in Webflow, a website creation tool. In the end, I learned that I still have to write a little code by myself, but the process is much faster than creating from scratch. So I'll stick with it for now.
I also updated our blog and found this list of typography resources I shared a while ago (in issue 5 of this newsletter) 😳 ! Since the newsletter has grown, I want to share this list again. I shared and reviewed some common resources for free/open-sourced fonts in this list. (The list is also available here if you want to bookmark it.)
Free Font Resources
Designing a font is highly specialized, time-consuming work. Sometimes It can take years to finish a font. Many hobbyists and professionals put their font designs online. While doing this fosters creativity, not all platforms have quality assurance checks for the fonts uploaded. Therefore, not all free fonts are equal.
When you search for free fonts from sites like Dafont.com, you might be using unfinished work, so you need to double-check and make sure the font you are thinking of using has all the letters and symbols you need. It is frustrating to create design works with poorly made tools.
Here are some common platforms offering free fonts I have encountered. I reviewed each resource and wrote additional tips and recommendations. Lastly, an important note about licenses: Similar to a stock photo, each font comes with a license. Always read the license carefully to determine eligibility for usage.
- Fonts are checked for quality before being uploaded
- Features many fonts with multiple weights and styles, like (Libre Franklin, Piazzola, Bungee)
- You need an adobe account (without purchasing a creative cloud subscription)
- Features font packs organized by themes
- Beware they will show you paid fonts when you search
- Tags organized by genres to help you search
- Some fonts are not up to date
- A platform for designers to showcase their work, and of course! You can find unique fonts here and beautiful visuals
- You have to know the keywords search for (for example, logo font)
- If you are savvy with Github, it’s a good place to look for open-sourced fonts
- You can start by searching under topics here
- This site features many works by hobbyists
- Some fonts do not have full sets of letters and symbols
- Make sure there are no weird spacing issues between any two letters
- You can double-check for the full character set and spacing issues by typing a pangram
Got a Small Budget?
If you are willing to pay a tiny bit, DJR and Futurefonts.xyz both have a good selection of fonts available. None of these are affiliate links - they are just useful platforms I have come across as a designer.
- A cheap monthly subscription of in-progress fonts from a professional
- You get a different font every month and all the updates that come with each font
- This is great if you are working on multiple projects
- This platform features work-in-progress fonts
- Each font comes with a report of what state the font is in
- Each purchase comes with free updates for the purchased font
Last Words…
One last tiny reminder to double-check licenses. Usually, open-source licenses are ok for commercial use.
Have a fantastic week!
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Have more questions about design and fonts?
Please email me hua@typogram.co or find me on Twitter at @HuaTweets.
You can also read the past issues on our brand new archive!.
