5 Excellent Sources To Download Free Text Fonts.
Times New Roman has his hands full while the rest of the font pack
squabbles over artsy fonts like Webdings. “˜Superhero’ Comic Sans
arrives in the nick of time to save the day.
Aren’t
we all a bit like that when we pick and choose fonts for our computer?
If you aren’t a designer, I can’t see you straying far from the
conservative Arial’s, Times new Roman’s, or a Calibri maybe. Comic Sans
is kept for the cutesy emails we tend to write once in a while.
Let’s blame it on the unwritten laws of font usage and those of
readability. The lane of common typefaces is narrow indeed. Most of us
dare not take the font road that is less travelled.
But what if
you really wanted to stand out with your computer fonts; be adventurous,
just like painting graffiti on a blank wall? Free computer fonts are
easily available. Free fonts that will make you stand out are littered
among them thanks to fearless typographic designers.
Mark’s
article at the above link is a great place to start. Let’s pick out a
few more free computer fonts and their sources. Stand out in style.
One of the fonts that caught my eye on 1001 Free Fonts is called
Chopin Script.
It’s a True Type Font that is in the style of Calligraphic fonts. The
site lists thousands of fonts for Windows and Macintosh. Most of them
are freeware, and some shareware.
How
about a trip to hell and back? Well, that’s the name of the font
pictured above. Ace Free Fonts groups 20309 true type fonts for Windows
and Mac. The fonts are free to download. You can sift through the fonts
by category, alphabetically, or use the tags. For your chosen font, you
can also checkout the full character map.
Sometimes
you might feel like writing an email in a typical handwritten style.
Even though you know that the recipient may not have that font installed
on his computer. I know I do, and that’s why I downloaded
[ank],
a handwriting script font. It is just one of the cool computer fonts
that the site hosts. What makes this site standout are the foreign
script fonts that are available for download from typeface designers
around the world.
The font collection is marked out with licenses (GNU/GPL, freeware, free for personal use, donationware, shareware or demo).
The
seven year old typographic website has a small but selective
collection. Small equates to 6846 fonts. Selective, corresponds to fonts
that are themed on movies, music, and games. If you like any typeface
used on a show’s credit, navigate to the
Themed Free Fonts section from the dropdown to check it out. How about
Star Wars? Though, I went for
X-Files.
The collection is selective and it doesn’t seem to be getting updated with new fonts.
If
you are still searching for themed fonts, then you could score a hit
at Famous Fonts. 300 free computer fonts to choose from; all
specifically themed on movies, shows, magazines, automobiles, logos etc.
The GodFather anyone?
Carnivalee Freakshow
is an abstract font that I downloaded from the site. It looks like one
of those retro typefaces from an old sepia toned poster. FontSpace has
13,500+ free fonts for you to choose from. The fonts are neatly arranged
in categories from the basic to more abstract styles like art deco you
can download, unzip and use on your Windows, Mac, or Linux systems. You
can test it out on the site itself with your custom text before a
download.
Urban
Fonts is a neat well designed site with 8000 free font files and
dingbats. You can browse through the free fonts quite easily. The custom
text box lets you see your words getting rendered by all the typefaces
listed on a page. Fonts are available for both Windows and Mac. As this
site has a large collection of free dingbats, I browsed through that for
jazzing up my PowerPoint presentations. The one above is called
Retrobats.
If you are feeling like going psychedelic with color and grunge for a change”¦try out the
Anthology font from Acid Fonts. The site has free fonts for Mac and Windows download arranged neatly in a few categories.
I had once written a post on
using drop caps to enhance your text in Microsoft Word. One of the free computer font categories you can visit here relates to that. You can go retro with
DecoCaps or stay on the safe side with
Media Gothic.
A
neat feature of the site is the dropdown that opens up with all font
information when you click on a specific typeface. You can also get to
similar fonts from here, do custom previews, see the character map, and
check the license before your download the font.
exljbris
is Jos Buivenga’s collection of free fonts. And looking at the
selections, you can only admire the handiwork of this type designer from
Netherlands.
Museo and
Calluna are two of his most
known typefaces from his font foundry. Some of the styles among his
creations are free. For example, the regular
Calluna which is a free download.
With
fonts, the great thing is that there’s no poverty of choice. You can
literally send your browser on a random chase and come up with loads of
free fonts. The trick is in knowing which font to use. Design work calls
for a tasteful eye”¦wording a document stresses on bulletproof fonts
for readability across different computers.
I will leave that
choice to you. Whatever your choice, you know you can go wild with your
imagination and stand out from the crowd with cool free computer
fonts.
Which is your favorite font?
Image credit: stallio
When
I was a little innocent computer newbie, still finding my way around a
keyboard and gasping with delight at the internet (“WOW! HOTMAIL!”), I
made a few really bad mistakes while learning. One of them (which I
still cringe about to this day) was back in 2000 when I installed 9000
fonts on Microsoft Word and then wondered why it took forever for the
damn thing to start up! (“Dear Mr Gates, I’d like to complain about your
Word product and its slow startup speed….”)
