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Five Great Resources for Finding Free Fonts
Image by ArrnoKath
From watermarking your photos to adding subheadings or designing a new blog header, a new font can breathe new life into your blog. Fonts can cost anywhere between a couple of pounds to a couple of hundred pounds but there are plenty of free options out there that are available for personal use.
While it’s best to stick to san-serif fonts for the body of your copy (check out this infographic for a great example of serif VS sans-serif pros and cons) it’s great fun to get more creative with the fonts you use in blogger headers, logos or in your sidebar.
Here is a list of five of our favourite places to find exciting new fonts that won’t cost you a penny…
With a constantly growing database of over 22,000 fonts, we can forgive DaFont for their slightly chaotic layout. If you’re not sure what type of font you want to use, you could browse this site for hours and barely scratch the surface of what it has to offer. Fortunately there is an extensive breakdown of style categories to search through, and a useful forum for font-related questions. There is also a separate forum on the site dedicated to helping users identify fonts from printed materials, brand logos and film posters.
This premium font database has a small but perfectly formed selection of free fonts, which we’ve linked to directly. It’s always worth checking out premium sites like this one, as they often have free trials or even a whole font family available – if you know where to look! As well as standard black, Hype for Type’s collection of fonts can also be viewed in a variety of different colours, making it easy to see if your new font will suit your blog’s design.
If you want to use your new font in a commercial venture, such as in the design of an ebook cover or for the online shop you run alongside your blog, Font Squirrel is your best friend. All the fonts in this extensive database are free for commercial use, and the font filter in the site’s sidebar allows you to search for fonts based on which type of license they come with.
With a growing collection of over 600 Open Source fonts, Google Fonts provides a fast and simple alternative to its rival typeface libraries. The benefit of using Google is that all the available fonts have been optimised for web use – while the highly decorative fonts you might find on aforementioned sites might be great for offline design work, such as blog headers, Google’s collection of fonts are compatible with every major browser and mobile device.
The wildcard of the bunch, Pinterest is a surprisingly handy place to find new fonts. Click through your favourite pin and yes, you’re likely to be redirected to one of the other font websites already mentioned here, but Pinterest will put a font into context for you. Search for fonts pairings to find typefaces that complement one another or look for a specific style of font, such as handwriting, and you’ll find a heap of ‘top ten’ lists to look through.
What’s your favourite resource for finding new fonts?
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