What Are Some Places to Get Free Fonts?
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. We 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.
Free Font Resources
- 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 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. If you are looking for something decorative, these two places are excellent to start.
- 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
If you are looking for additional resources about fonts and design, check out FontDiscovery, our weekly newsletter sharing font resources, design tips, and inspirations!