Get ‘em all: FOnT$!
Ever felt confused about where to get good quality fonts on the web? Unsure about licensing and commercial use of fonts? And what on earth are fonts and typefaces anyway? Let’s clear up the confusion with this brief guide to the world of fonts.
We will cover the most important topics about fonts, including:
Make yourself a cup of coffee (…or grab your favorite drink) and let’s explore the best sources to download fonts for free.
There is always a suitable font for every design project. No matter if webdesign, t-shirt designs, posters, magazines or even a birthday card for your grandma.
And the best part is, many great fonts are free to use for any of these purposes.
But let’s start with a little Fonts 101, shall we?
FONTS 101
First let’s start off by determining the difference between a font and a typeface.
These two terms most often are used synonymously. And for the most part that might as well be ok. But just in short to lift the confusion a bit:
A typeface can be considered a font family, a set of fonts that may differ in some visual aspects, but they still share a common aesthetic.
A font is a set of glyphs, letters, numbers and symbols with a particular, unified style.
In traditional letterpress printing, the font would be the set of metal letters that are formed to typeset a page in a unified style. In the digital age, usually the font is the file that is used on a computer.
To illustrate this even better, let’s take the “Merriweather” font:
The Merriweather Regular 400 is the font that belongs to the “Merriweather” font family.
The Merriweather Regular 400 Italic is also a font of the same font family.
But each of them is a font on its own. One font has the styling “Regular 400”, the other font has a different styling that is “Regular 400 Italic”.
This hopefully makes it clear without making the things overcomplicated. In the further course we will stick to the term font(s) just for the sake of simplicity.
Another basic but important distinction you need to know is between serif and sans-serif fonts.
When you see a font that is labeled as “serif”, this simply means that this particular font has a distinctive style: Serifs are the little lines or strokes that are attached to a glyph.
Times New Roman is probably the most popular serif font out there. Contrary to that, Arial is probably the most sans-serif font out there.
If we stick to our “Merriweather” font example, you might notice this distinction even better:
The Merriweather Regular 400 is the serif-font version.
The Merriweather Sans Regular 400 is the sans serif version of the Merriweather typeface.
So sans-serif fonts simply don’t have any attached strokes to them.
If you know these basic distinctions and terms and if you don’t feel the need to get way too deep into the science of fonts, you’re good to go with this foundation.
Where to get (free) fonts
Now that we got the basics out of the way, let’s move on to the juicy part.
So, where can you actually find the good fonts – for free of course?
DaFont is probably one of the best-known websites on the web when it comes to free fonts.
They have a vast amount of available fonts and you can find almost any particular style you can imagine. From calligraphic to playful styles, you can sink in countless hours browsing the font library. Just keep in mind that many fonts are only for private and not for commercial use. More on that in the next section.
However, such a vast selection inevitably comes with varying levels of quality. So finding a good quality font, especially for commercial purposes, can become challenging and time consuming.
But it’s generally a good place to get a feel for the font style you are looking for. If you just want to make a quick draft of a design with a particular font style in mind, you can find what you need pretty quickly. They also have a good filter to help you find the type of font that you’re looking for quicker.
For private projects like birthday cards and the like, this might be even your best place to find some quirky and unusual fonts to play around with.
MyFonts might look similar to DaFont at the first glance, but in reality it’s not the case.
Where DaFonts offers mainly free or, to be more precise, freemium like fonts, MyFonts’ main focus is to sell fonts right away.
But why is this platform even mentioned here? Simply because you can find some really nice fonts for free by utilizing their search filter. Simply click on “view all fonts” and after that drag the price slider on the left side to zero. You’ll find a neat selection of fonts.
The great part about MyFonts is their easy to find, clear and pretty straight forward licensing conditions-overview.
Behance is another source for free fonts, but with a catch:
Owned by Adobe, Behance is in the first place a portfolio site for creatives and not a font site per se.
Creatives around the world use Behance to host their portfolio and to showcase their projects. To drive attention, they often share some bits of their work to download, and that can also include free fonts.
Just type in “fonts” or “free fonts” in the search field and set the filter to free on the results page.
Keep in mind that you might stumble over some bummers sometimes, because the download links to a resource can be outdated and not available or they lead you to the author’s store page where the actual font you want isn’t free anymore or only free for private use. Reading the fine print is key.
So Behance isn’t specifically a font website, but you can sometimes find some great fonts and other resources there that you can even use for commercial projects.
You can check out our portfolio on Behance as well, if you like.
Speaking of owned by Adobe, let’s talk about Adobe Fonts.
This one is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, if you will. So if you don’t have an active subscription to any of Adobe’s Creative Cloud services, just skip this part if you like. Adobe Fonts are not free in the sense that you can go and download them, but rather you can use them free of additional charges with any active Creative Cloud subscription. So even if you only use e.g. Adobe Photoshop, you will be granted access to the vast library of around 30,000 fonts that are available for personal and commercial use.
If you sign in on Adobe Fonts with your Adobe account and activate the fonts and font families that you like, they become available in the font-list of your Adobe program(s) like Photoshop and Illustrator.
In summary, Adobe Fonts is pretty much a no-brainer for anyone with an active subscription, but it’s still important to pay attention to the licensing terms.
Finally, let’s get to my personal champion: Google Fonts.
I don’t hand the crown to Google lightly, so let me elaborate why Google Fonts is my personal number one source for (free) fonts.
First of all, the fonts offered here are all truly free. You won’t find fonts or links that have some hidden costs behind them. Second, the license is clear and you can preview it for every font. Usually they come with a SIL Open Font License or the Apache License. You can use the fonts either for private or commercial purposes without any trouble. No matter if it’s for web design, T-Shirt design, social media posts, poster design or any other use case, there are basically no limits.
From clean serif and sans-serif fonts to calligraphic or even very playful fonts, you certainly will find something that suits your project’s needs. Just utilize the filter options on the right side and explore a vast selection of cool fonts. A nice addition is also the very expansive Icons library, in case you ever need some for one of your design projects.
To sum it up: Google Fonts is truly the best source for free fonts without hidden costs, no subscription requirement and it’s not tied to any particular app or program.
So if you need fonts without the licensing headache and free of any sort of commitment – you don’t even need to sign in with your Google account to download the fonts – Google Fonts is undoubtedly your best place to start.
Avoid Traps
This section might be a lifesaver for people who are just starting out with commercial design but aren’t yet well versed in navigating the legal pitfalls and challenges of running a business. And licensing of design assets can become a great pitfall, if you don’t keep your eyes open.
As hinted in the previous sections, a proper commercial license is not only essential for your peace of mind, but also for maintaining a professional and credible reputation with your customers and target audience.
Just imagine for example: You just finished a design project for your client and you used, let’s say, a font from DaFont. But unfortunately, you didn’t check the license terms and accidentally used a font that is not permitted for commercial use. And imagine that by chance the font author finds out that your client’s huge marketing campaign contains material, in this case the font(s), that is not properly licensed. So the font creator can and probably will make legal claims against your client—and possibly against you as well. It’s not hard to see where this is going, right?
Therefore it’s mandatory to point this out. Even before the first draft is made, please always make sure if and how the license terms for your desired assets are clearly defined!
And that’s why Google Fonts is king here, because the probability to get into trouble is very low to nonexistent. You can even hand over the fonts to your clients, something that isn’t as easy with other free and even paid fonts oftentimes.
Another important point in short is the security of websites. Always stick to credible sites and sources, the above mentioned all are. Especially nowadays the web is sadly flooded with fake- and scam sites that will either get you a virus on your machine, or you’ll end up losing your money without getting anything in return. So please always double check the sites you are visiting and don’t hit the download button hastily.
Keep all this in mind and you are set for your future design endeavours.
Conclusion
Hopefully this little guide on fonts and where to find the good ones for free will help you on your creative journey and your next design project will go even smoother than ever before.
But what if your struggle isn’t just with fonts, but also with illustrations, designs, and their composition?
In this case you might want to check out our vector graphic design assets that are just right to kickstart your creative process.
Many of our design templates do not only come with suitable fonts, but also with an original design composition and handcrafted illustrations, as well as a commercial license on top! And the best part: everything is easy to edit and to mix and match.
So if this guide made you go on the hunt for new amazing fonts, you can try them out right away with one of our vector design sets:
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