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This week — no. 14

Quiet authority

Merriweather sets the tone in one line. Lato stays out of the way and lets it.

MERRIWEATHER 700  +  LATO 400

A font specimen, a pairing that works, and one line on why it works. That is the whole email.

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16 Most Popular Sites to Download Free Fonts

You like to download fonts! You are a font hoarder! Well, you’ll want to be sure that you have these free font sites bookmarked. If you’ve been to these popular font sites already, why not swing by and pay them a quick update visit? And if you haven’t heard of a few, there is no better time than the present to drop by. free-fonts

Are high quality free fonts really hard to find?

Well, yes. Honestly, a lot of free fonts are not high quality. We know this. You have been warned. Missing glyphs, bad kerning, incomplete weight sets, no real italic, etc. You probably have been burned! Some of the sites below really don’t discriminate very well with what they offer. You have to dig around for sure. But it’s still fun to window shop and see what talented and budding typographers are coming up with and releasing for the fun of it. Some fonts are so bad they are just a hoot to look at. The quality of the free fonts sites below varies. Some carry every junkie, stupid, copycat font since the the dawn of time, and others are more like foundries. Others are popular commercial sites with high-quality, select, free fonts from a typeface (if you know how to search for them).

But why these free font websites?

You no doubt will recognize some the typefaces on the smaller boutique sites. So the size of the site, or number of fonts, or quality of fonts, was not considered or measured in any way. The research for this list was not based on quality, but simply on popularity. Caveat emptor! So, the following sites are listed based on nothing more than a combination of site rank data, link backs, mentions, and social media, and a few other criteria. That is how we ranked what we call, for the sake of this list, popularity.

Where are the really high quality free fonts?

As a quick aside before the list, and before you start shopping and downloading, you will want to visit or bookmark two articles where we did some heavy lifting of sorting through these sites (and others) below. These typefaces stand out for obvious reasons once you see the articles: That said, by visiting the site below, you are going to find some good stuff…you just have to keep looking!

16 Most Popular Sites to Download Free Fonts

dafont

Urban Fonts

1001 Free Fonts

Font Squirrel

FontSpace

Font Cubes

The League of Moveable Type

Fonts 500

FontStock.net

Acid Fonts

Lost Type

  • Rating:
  • Site: losttype.com (note: “pay what you want” model, or buy a t-shirt)

Impallari

FontFabric

MyFonts

  • Rating:
  • Site: myfonts.com (note: advanced search option and price set to $0)

fonts.com

  • Rating:
  • Site: fonts.com (note: sort by price)

Font Garden

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About Douglas Bonneville

Douglas has been a graphic designer since 1992, in addition to software developer and author. He is a member of Smashing Magazine's "Panel of Experts" and has contributed to over 100 articles. He is the author of "The Big Book of Font Combinations", loves cats, and plays guitar.

Comments

  1. I would like to know a site for signwriting bold/heavy fonts suitable for vinyl cutting especially

  2. You can find bold and other heavy and suitable fonts at most of the sites listed. Give them a spin, especially fontsquirrel.com

About BonFX

Douglas Bonneville has been a graphic designer since 1992 and has written about type here since 2009. BonFX is a blog about typography and design, and the books that came out of it.

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